The world adores matt hayward

In a recent press Johannesburg press conference, Jeremy Clarkson was asked what he thought about South African wine. His comment, ‘well it’s better than Australian wine’. Given that the poms love to go Aussie bashing, it was to be expected. But it got me thinking, has the average Aussie tried a South African wine? Australia is a definitive ‘new world’ wine country. So we should be free of the snobbery of the Champagne or Alsace region of France where appellations are mandated and chateaus centuries old. You’d think we’d be open minded about wine. Sadly not.

I put it to the average ‘long in the leg, thick in the head Aussie’ that you are the world’s most unmitigated wine snob. You buy all your wine from the one shop (Dan Murphys). For those of you who came in late or are not Aussies, Dan Murphys is a booze supermarket, like a Wal Mart dedicated to everything alcoholic. Good to save a few bucks, but just like Wal Mart, you save a bundle on somethings and get totally ripped off. Worse than that, you’re not getting any story behind the wine, you hardly ever meet the makers and you’re served by some spotty git that only knows what’s good because the manager always knicks it. Their ‘cellar’ is an industrial warehouse the size of Belgium and that’s about it. There’s no guy with a beard that could tell you everything from the etymology of the name of the terroir of the soil.

Secondly, all your information comes from at best two sources, Jeremy Oliver (no not the celebrity chef) and some bloke Halliday. Have you read these books? I have read the later in detail. He tastes about 4000 wines a year and can often take the piss if you read enough of it. My problem with these books is it’s like calling and insurance company for a quote for fully comprehensive on your car. ‘what’s the make and model?’, ‘an 86 Camira sedan’. ‘OK your insurance will be $500′, ‘OK. It’s that arbitrary. So they’ve made finding fine wine like getting a quote on your car insurance. It’s just statistics. I put it to you that that’s not a journey, it’s a destination. And it’s bloody boring. I did not get into wine to learn better maths. Ever been to a proper wine tasting not just to get pissed, but to get a different opinion or learn something? Probably not. Ever been to a cellar door? In the truest sense unlikely.

Thirdly, go to your local Dan Murphys. Pick up a ten dollar bottle of French plonk and you’re looked at as some ‘un ooostraayalan’ wine terrorist. The only exception being a bottle of Sauv Blanc from New Zealand for the ladies. God forbid you look at a brilliant Argentinian drop, a brilliant Croatian Chardonnay or a South African Rose. It’s like slapping Don Bradman in the face. Just buy your Shiraz rated at 96 points (sadly there are quite a few rated so highly) and get back in your Commodore, off to your football club barby.

Frankly, I envy the British like Clarkson. They’re in a position where they have ample old world wine. They also have brilliant wine from the Americas, Africas and Oceania and will pick the best for a price range. But there’s no tall poppy syndrome when it comes to the continent it’s from. They have no real domestic wine and the whole world is your oyster. It appears to be about what’s good and what’s reasonably priced. God forbid Australians should ever be so open minded.

Finally, sure snobs of any kind suck. But give me the informed, erudite snob with a story to tell any day that I could learn something from than some Barry McKenzie wanna be fuckwit that thinks just because people are ill informed enough to spend $450 on a bottle of Penfolds Grange, everything Australian is great thank you very much. Sadly, trophy wines like Penfolds that satisfy a demographic and not a palette are doing a great deal of damage to our international reputation. If the Average Barry Humphries Aussie took a blind taste test, he or she would probably find that even South American wine is blinding more interesting than the staid old Aussie Shiraz.

My conclusion is this. If you only drink an Aussie Shiraz and bugger the rest of the world, stick to beer. You’re being the wine snob you think you’re not being. Oh the irony. And I’d rather hear someone tell me some scintillating wine bogus adventure than the latest 5000 wines that Halliday has tasted between soires.

Please for the love of god telling me how great Aussie wine is when you’re too scared to try anything else. If that was the case, I’d still be listening to New Kids on the Block for music. Wine continues to amaze me because you can never try everything. You could never know everything about it. You can’t possibly try everything. That should be a good thing, not a bad thing! Stop being so stuck up and put some imagination into your drinking Australia. You bore me!

OMFG! I am so friggin’ excited. A movie about Lemmy is all but in the can and will be released in 2009. In the teaser alone, there’s Slash (who must be the Lemmy in training), Dave Grohl, Alice Cooper, Mick Jones and some other guy from the Clash and of course the other two blokes in Motorhead! Not much else is said about it except two of the guys from Poison will be in - meh. Not even that can trash this movie. On a side note, I hope Metallica are in this given they owe their whole livelihood to Motorhead!

In the mean time, you can search for the Classic Albums episode on the Aces of Spades album - a true classic - and “Motorhead: Live Fast Die Old” (by Channel 4 in the UK) filmed in 2003. Both have a great dose of Lemmy’s inimitable character and humor. The later is a little more candid and realistic, but both are fantastic. If the movie can be half as good as these two, it will still be awesome. For better or for worse, it promises to be so much more.

Man, this movie has a lot to live up to, but I am so excited. Become a fan of Motorhead on Facebook to get updates like this. How many more sleeps until 2009?

For the trailer, see http://www.lemmymovie.com/

This rendition of ‘Sailor Man’ by Turbonegro is just so damned funny. Enjoy.

Er, this is so weired I had to check for the obligtory April Fools, but it’s dated May 2005! The Cambodian Midget Fighting League (all 42 of them) apparently decided to take on a lion in some sort of cage match.

The fight was slated when an angry fan contested Yang Sihamoni, President of the CMFL, claiming that one lion could defeat his entire league of 42 fighters.

Those little fellers didn’t do so well:

Sihamoni was quoted before the fight stating that he felt since his fighters out-numbered the lion 42 to 1, that they “… could out-wit and out-muscle [it].”

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

Don’t believe me, well it’s from the BBC! Something tells me the won’t be a video on Youtube and I’m not game enough to look at work.

Well iiNET are very proactive after you call them. So much so after you call help desk, they send you an email that goes  like this.

Thank you for your call this morning,

Skye spoke to you this morning at ##:## AM WST regarding your enquiry. We
understand that you may be midway through this transaction at present;
however to enable us to improve and provide specific guidance and feedback
to Skye, we would like you to fill out a very short survey. 

To complete the survey, please click on the following link:

[insert link here] 

If you do not wish to participate in any more of these surveys,
you can unsubscribe by modifying your mail settings on the iiNet
toolbox available at https://toolbox.iinet.net.au

Normally, I wouldn’t bother with a reply. But given that I had spent almost enough time on the phone to watch most of an average B-grade movie,  there was plenty to talk about. So I provided them with this reply in their little survey. This went in the ‘free text’ field of their response.

It took approx 65 minutes to answer the phone. [operator name] was lovely and I have absolutely no complaints about her demeanour or level of diligence; she was truly the only hope you guys would have in organising a dance number in a Bollywood movie, let alone fornication in a brothel. Hats off to her.

What I do wish to complain about in no uncertain terms is that when I’ve clearly identified myself as a broadband customer using the IVR, I’m forced to listen to the same dial up customer announcements on rotation for 65 minutes. Why would I be interested in a dial up accelerator when I am clearly a broadband customer? Unlike the location of most of your call centres, the quality of your customer service has seriously gone south in the 18 odd months I’ve been using your service. Can I suggest convergence into other industries where you could promote bacon on a Kosher butcher’s IVR, beef to Hindus perhaps? It’s equally futile and about as annoying.

Furthermore, please inform me where to send the invoice for my time waisted to iiNet. Otherwise if you did want to make amends for the truly below par customer experience, please follow these directions:

1. Print this message off, preferably on A3 paper or larger
2. Make a bull’s eye like target in the centre of the paper. Make it fairly large
3. Go to the bathroom and make yourself comfortable over the target.
4. Stimulate your tummy until the target you drew earlier is covered with your fresh stool sample. If you’re having trouble, simply call 13 22 58
5. starting from the outside in, roll up the printed email into a neat bag
6. proceed to your manager’s office
7. get your manager to hold the bag at just below shoulder height
8. punch it

Tell your manager if he wants to know who the message is from, unwrap the bag and tell him I send my regards.

The above nine steps should go some way in providing some sort of empathy for the futility of your customer service that as a former customer, I had been repeatedly subjected to. Although I will be recommending your services to my de facto mother in law. Frankly, you two deserve each other. Hopefully you will both null each other out, and the world will yet again be free of persistent, nagging annoyances.

P.S. 65 minutes is a really long time to spend on the phone. I like ending letters in moot points.

On average, you’d be lucky to spend only 20 minutes on the phone waiting for iiNet - for sales or tech support enquiries.
It does also highlight the fact that why do companies ask questions in their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, e.g. ‘press 1 for voice, press 2 for data services’ if they don’t inform staff what you’ve entered.

It’s good to know that not only are iiNet completely under resourced, they’re being incredibly useless with their processes as well. Given that I was calling to cancel the service, you’d think they’d at least know I was a broadband customer and tell me some compelling reason to stay with them. Oh no, you just keep hearing the same ‘ask us about the dial-up accelerator’ announcement 50 times. With all the time and resources they put into their post call survey, why not make the IVR service more intelligent? Or put the money into more staff!?

Anyways, rant dies here. Interestingly, when I joined iiNet at least 18 months ago, the service was phenomenal. But given that help desk makes up so much of what you pay for with DSL, it’s not even worth mentioning whether the broadband was good or not.  As it turns out it was like when Shannon Doherty in the movie Mall Rats describes her ex-lovers appendage as a ‘decent size’. That’s about the nicest thing you can say really.

Well at least you’d be saying this if you were Karl Rove. Whose apparently Norwegian, pierced penis, queer pioneer adopted father is meant to be according to this article. Some bloke who claims that Louis Rove used to go to piercing parties with him in the seventies, where they’d pierce each other on coffee tables, claims to own Mr Rove’s favorite golden cock ring.

If you’re really game, read the source article here. The alledged Louis Rove has so many piercings, he’s like an inverted colander or a gold plated, purple headed Darlek. Well at least he can follow in his son’s footsteps and join the Conservative Party in the UK…

Aah when the truth comes out about neo-cons. Oh dear god I hope that this is true. This is funnier than the refugees that snuck into England in Tony Blair’s customised BMW limo… Pure gold! Ironically I found this because I was searching for the apparent new You Am I album title “I’m Proud Of My Gay Son”. This find was almost as good as a new You Am I album. But please Timmy, top this one!

A friend at work showed me this the other day. In the fine tradition of learning through parody and mockery comes the series You Suck At Photoshop. Call it a Web 2.0 version of Web Pages that Suck, a site that rocked my world about 10 years ago as a budding young web producer. But don’t call it average, because the bloke doing this series is a class act!

Basically this is Photoshop techniques taught through sarcasm, scorn and maximum bitterness. In the first episode, layering techniques are demonstrated. So Donny Photoshops his marriage certificate on the inside window of ‘the van his wife and high school friend are in every Friday night’. Basically every episode is punctuated by his married life coming to a sudden end. Like the episode that covers the Photoshopping the wedding ring off of the finger in episode 3.

Anyway, if you type ‘You Suck At Photoshop’ into Youtube, there’s five episodes at the time of writing. All pant wettingly funny and laden with irony. With what little I know about Photoshop , they actually are pretty good tutorials too (e.g. his alternatives to the clone tool). So if you’re copping it at work and need a quick sarcastic fix to pull you through, give it a crack.

Last night I was having dinner when there was a knock at the door. A very skinny, dark skinned kid about 20 was at the door. He claimed to be an Israeli art student (from Tel Aviv university. But that uni doesn’t offer art on it’s curriculum page) selling paintings, only ‘he wasn’t allowed to sell his own work’. His English wasn’t too bad.

Strangely for an Israeli guy he didn’t seem to know about Caufield and Balaclava - two of the biggest Jewish areas in Melbourne. He said he was staying outside of Melbourne.

The whole time he was showing us his paintings, it was in the back of my mind that I’d heard this story before. Then I found this link from 2004. The elephant painting in this article was in this art kid’s portfolio. Small co-incidence? There are a whole bunch of articles about possible Mossad spy activity in the US and a bunch of Israeli art students being deported. Some were caught at DEA building and military areas. Very, very suss.

Like the link above, the guy told me someone would be in touch about having it framed. This is not something i’m looking forward to.

If any of you guys here of Israeli art students going door to door in Melbourne, please comment here. I am dying to find out what is going on. Because clearly they’re not art students. But why would they be repeating this scam in Melbourne?

At best it’s second-rate art sold at a premium. At least according to this New Zealand article again from 2004, suggesting there’s nothing more sinister than that. I suspect as they’re suggesting, it is simply art of no value mass produced in China. Mostly copies of the real deal.

Would be very interested to see if there are any more occurrences of this…

Follow up 11/02/08: after 8 comments, 1 email and a link to this page from a Russian site, this is a proven scam. Even the Northern Territory Police have issued a warning. This scam is being worked from Russia, to Arizona, to Auckland and everywhere in between. Thanks all for the continued feedback. Please keep it coming!

Welcome back to wacky moment of the week! Ages ago, I saw Slayer playing born to be wild on some stupid American sport show. The sound levels were all wrong, the show as all white bread and it was just plain wrong. That was going to be moment of the week until I found this little gem.

In this vid, someone’s grabbed an original Ed Sullivan Show appearance by Steppenwolf playing born to be wild. Sounds normal enough, but they’ve overdubbed the studio version of Slayer’s cover version. And the results are plainly hilarious.

Watch the vid at youtube here.

Well I’m now back in civilisation after Christmas with the family. Just wanted to say a belated merry Christmas to all. Thanks to all who sent cards and text messages on the day.

Special shout-outs to those who supported us in Movember this year (especially one very generous person), and the Herald Sun for publishing our pic the day after. Our group raised twice as much money as last year, for diseases described by Al Pacino in Donny Brasco as ‘cancer of the cock’.

2008 will bring some challenges. Extra special shout-outs for those having kids (you know who you are!) or buying houses in the new year. All the best and good luck for future challenging times.

To all the player haters doing MBAs, you’re not automatically MVPs. Please for the love of god, DO SOMETHING ORIGINAL! Remember when the objective of post grad education was to learn something to better yourself, not instant career gratification? To learn something you may apply one day, not just because everyone else in your department is doing it?

If you’re doing one, or some other high falutin post grad that you think earns you wanker points in conversation, in the words of Johnny Rotten ‘how lovely for you’.

Nonetheless, the best of luck to even the player haters anyway.  Thanks to Ice T for the ebonics!

Anyways, as the years get quicker and tougher, all the best and good luck. Happy 2008 to all from the dodgiest blog in town! Shalom! Peace!