News Ltd Takes the Piss

I am delighted to present to you a piece of sub-editorial silliness that I'd like to think would make Stuart Littlemore chuckle.

During a pre-bedtime news check, I logged onto news.com.au to find this on the front page:

Now look closer at the top story next to the wannabe model:

Notice something familiar about that photo?

It is, in fact, Andre Serrano's Piss Christ, a controversial artwork first displayed in America in 1989. In 1997, it came to Australia, where two teenagers smashed it with a hammer as it hung in the National Gallery of Victoria.

It's called Piss Christ because it is a photograph of a small crucific suspended in a jar of the artist's own urine.

I love the thought that a late-night sub-editor saw a story about an alleged exorcism, did a quick Google search to find a religious-related photograph, was attracted by the bright yet filmy orange of the Piss Christ, and whacked it up without a second thought.

Although, it could be that the sub-editor is making a meta-point about the terrible things that have been done to religion, or in the name of religion. Perhaps he or she is having the last laugh. In that case, I salute you, subversive sub-editor.

I wanted to put these screen shots up because I suspect by Tuesday morning it will be long gone.

But I'll let you make your own jokes about the front page of News Limited's flagship website being covered in urine.

Boys Behaving Badly

Ah, the National Rugby League. A game full of fine, upstanding young gentlemen, full of enthusiasm for a healthy and active lifestyle, with impeccable manners and enormous respect for women.

Toilet training, however, seems to be optional.

This evening, Roosters player Nate Myles was suspended for six matches over a drunken incident in a NSW Central Coast hotel yesterday morning. Apparently, an extremely inebriated Myles attempted to barge his way into the wrong room, before being discovered naked and disorientated in a fire escape. But the classiest part? Myles was found to have defecated on himself in a corridor.

I don't know. Perhaps he thought the hotel was a dump, and decided to crank out a three-dimensional critical review.

Now I'm not a drinker. Despite what The Wah claims about that time in Scotland when I had to skull a pot of beer and a peach schnapps in order to win a trivia contest*, I have never been drunk. So I don't know how bad things can get when you're completely muntered and need a privvy urgently. But honestly, how bad does it have to be to drop trou in the middle of a inn to get half your middles out?

Then we've got the revelation that a bunch of Aussie sailors on the ironically-named HMAS Success have been sent home after their cute little "See How Many Chicks We Can Bang" competition was discovered - no doubt by humourless femminazis who weren't featured on their charming list.

I was astounded by the number of people calling talkback radio today to say various versions of the following:

"Oh, it's just young people with healthy libidos. It's been going on for years! Matter of fact, when I was in the service, it was the GIRLS who used to rate the blokes! What's all the fuss about?"

Now I know that being in the military, or police, or politics - or any kind of workplace really - might often seem like a school camp, full of that away-from-home unreality magic. I remember my own Year Nine school camp, when Andrew Barlow gallantly asked me to "snog him", despite his outright loathing of me during normal school hours.**

I appreciate that people like to have sex with other people, and that the achievement of said sex can become a hot topic amongst various peer groups. But to keep a ledger? And award points?

It's so... it's so... it's so Schoolies Week.***

I don't like to draw too much of a conclusion about the macho cultures of rugby league football and the Royal Australian Navy, but I will say there was a fair whack of Hahn Super Dry consumed after our impro show last Saturday, and the worst result was a hangover that caused several players some uncomfortable "I-need-to-stay-in-a-cool-dark-place" moments the next day.

There's always a fair bit of sexual tension in scripted theatre too - with cast crushes common, and cast party shenanigans almost compulsory. And yet, and yet! We've all managed to keep our bowel movements private and our sexual bragging modest.


*Yes, that's right, the Scots found a way to incorporate a drinking contest into their trivia competitions.

** I refused. He was seeeeeeedy. Then he didn't talk to me for three years. I didn't mind.

***Which I didn't go on. Being a non-drinker, and not particularly interested in more potential Andrew Barlow-style offers, I didn't mind.

Blood and Laughter

Heading back in to the Brisbane Arts Theatre for the second season of Prognosis: Death! was like being reunited with a long-lost love, and finding everything that was exciting and wonderful and fulfilling the first time around is still just as it was.

We played with a slightly different opening for our first show, "St Love and the Visitors", because we wanted to add in some extra soap opera-style plot twists. The plot - about brain-eating aliens possessing St Love Hospital's resident priest, Reverend Jeremy Thistlewaite - took slightly longer to build, but the return of Dr Burton Mangold (the Best Damn Doctor in St Love), and the revelation of the invading aliens as rather camp showgirls made for a great second half. Plus we had GREEN blood:

Friday saw us hit absolute top stride with "St Love and the Phantom", which became a medical-comedy-musical-parody of Andrew Lloyd-Webber's famous production, with a one-time Best Damn Doctor rising up from his rat-infested lair in the hospital basement to seduce Dr Melody Carmichael with the piano accordion. It was wonderful.

Finally, our wonderful musician Kris took these shots of me before and after my blood encounter on Friday night - I couldn't believe I'd made it to the interval with my uniform still clean:

But I made up for it at the end of Act Two, with The Wah (Director & Chief Blood Dispersal Operator) shooting three large syringes full of our sugary blood mix straight at me:

I can honestly repeat my assertion that making an audience laugh - and on occasion, cheer - is the best feeling in the world. I adore this show, I adore everyone in it - and I love the fact our audiences seem to adore it too. I can't wait for tonight.

Prognosis: Death! RELAPSE
Brisbane Arts Theatre, 210 Petrie Terrace
8pm (Sat 4, Thu 9, Fri 10, Sat 11 July)
Book on 3369 2344 (or just rock up)

#Twotto

I picked up a QuickPick yesterday for tonight's OzLotto $90 million dollar super draw. A QuickPick lets the newsagent's Whiz-Bang Random Number Auto-Generator Machine takes the hard work out of crossing numbers off a ticket. In our busy modern world, it's the occasional gambler's best friend.

But then I decided to open myself up to different possibilities.

Surely, I thought to myself, this gigantic jackpot is a good opportunity as any to really tap in to the gestalt mind of my collective friend and acquaintance group. To harness the brain power of reasoned, thinking persons, with the hope of creating a whole greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Or, in simpler terms, to get a bunch of people to throw numbers at me.

I used Twitter, the oh-so-popular social networking service that both fascinates and frustrates me in turn. Calling my experiment #twotto (a combination of "twitter" and "lotto"), I started soliciting for numbers between 1 and 45. I promised to reward them if I did in fact win. You know, throw 'em a slab of Crown Lager or a Myer gift voucher or something.

I got enough replies to fill six games of a bright yellow Oz Lotto ticket:

My ticket to Barbados & a date with Richard Armitage. I mean - er - my ticket to
helping others including charities, homeless spinsters, hairless giraffes and whatever.

The seventh game was made up of The Wah's contribution. Genetically incapable of being excited by gambling, he loftily reiterated the fact that the draw is completely random, and all numbers have equal chance of being pulled out of the mechanical tumbola. Ergo, his seven numbers ran 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Interestingly, I found the most commonly suggested numbers were, in order, 14, 27 and 7. ALL MULTIPLES OF SEVEN.

And yet, what happened this evening, when the draw finally took place?

Of course - nothing.

A few of the #twotto games recorded one winning number; one got two - all of which equates to sweet Fanny Adams, as my father would say.

However! After checking over the #twotto ticket, I then examined my QuickPick ticket.

Four winning numbers, which equates to a Division 6 - the second-lowest - prize of $20.45.

In this case, THE MACHINES BEAT THE HUMANS.

I think there's a lesson in that for all of us.

Terrorist Chickens

"Watch out!" squealed my ten-year-old cousin, Amber. "They're terrorist chickens!"

I was plonked on the asphalt driveway of my aunt's home, trying to snap some pictures of her "pet" chickens.

"They are!" Amber enthused, as my other cousin Alex fluttered about herding the browny-orange birds in the direction of my lens. "This wild rooster got in, and got them excited, and bit me on the bum!" she said. "I kicked it away, but it came back, and bit me again!"

"You got bitten on the bum by a Wild Rooster Terrorist Chicken - twice?"

"Yes!" she nodded. "So what makes these chickens terrorist chickens, then?" I asked.

"Oh, they're all the same!" was the reply, as she scrambled for safety into the passenger side of her parents' car and slammed the door behind her.

I don't know. I thought the chickens were reasonably charming. But maybe Amber's got a point. Sometimes, those chickens, when they look at you...

The King is Dead

The scariest nightmare I've ever had was about Michael Jackson.

I don't mean that disrespectfully, now that the King of Pop's heart has given out, and he lies, getting colder, on a slab at the UCLA mortuary. But it's the strongest personal memory I can grasp of the man right now.

The very first Compact Disc my mother bought my brother and I was Michael Jackson's 1992 epic Dangerous. I still know all the words to "Black Or White" and "Who Is It?". After Madonna's Erotica, it was the defining album of my pre-teen music experience, and my brother and I would rock out in the rumpus room for hours on end listening to it.

I don't remember when Michael Jackson became scary, exactly. But by the time of my nightmare, which occured in the early 2000s, he was a frightening wreck of a shadow of his former self.

In my nightmare, my parents were forcing me to marry Michael Jackon in - of all places - the Imax Theatre at Dreamworld (a Gold Coast themepark). Now I hate Imax theatres - I get motion sickness - and there I was, dressed in some sort of giant poufy peach dress, with a massive veil, up at the back, facing Jacko, in a full HIStory-era spangled faux-military outfit, down the front.

I remember turning, and sobbing at my parents, saying "Please don't make me marry Michael Jackson!" And that's when I woke up, in a sweat, with tears in my eyes. It took me ages to calm down enough to risk sleeping again.

(Of course my dear parents would never have forced me to marry Michael Jackson. My mum enjoyed his music well enough, but my Dad just thought he was weird.)

His death brings to a close a brilliant yet bizarre career. His musical genius and extraordinary performance skills will be remembered; but his legacy will be dogged by the plastic surgery rumours and startling image makeovers, and of course, the Never Never Ranch and his acquittal on child molestation charges.

Hopefully his children will have time to grieve and recover in privacy; I hope even more they avoid some of the terrors their father faced.

Dangerous may have been the Michael Jackson solo album I listened to most, but in these hours after his death, I choose to remember the young, energetic, bright Michael of the Jackson Five - in one of my all-time favourite songs.

Pigs & Birds

I'm just going to show you this photo...

...and let you make up your own joke captions. Extra points if you can do something original with "swine flu".

I met this perky pink porker at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, where I did the last of my MC gigs for the Queensland Firebirds. I've been hosting the pre-game corporate functions for the side's home games. It's been a lot of fun. I've redeveloped an interest in netball, a game I last played as an 11-year-old. Boy, things are different since my days in the GK bib. Players are tall, lithe, quick, nimble and aggressive (in a good way). And the sport is run by people who actually care about the players and the sport's reputation.

Plus they chuck free blue mini-netballs and frisbees into the crowd during the quarter-time breaks.

Netballers can't rely on their sporting salaries to survive; most work full or part-time jobs elsewhere. However, it was revealed at tonight's function that the current ANZ Championship series has recorded higher TV viewing figures on average than both the A-League football and the Super 14 - both of which have much bigger piggy banks than the fellow pictured above.

So if you're looking for a sport to get behind that's full of competitive spirit, action and goodwill, you could do worse than try netball.

There was a moment in the foyer this evening which confirmed one of my own personal maxims - that where there is a person inside a full-size animal costume, there are children keen to beat the shit out of them. Sadly I was too late on the record button to capture the attempted piggy thrashing, so instead, enjoy some funky pig dancing: