Say Something...

Yea I don't really know if that's a word but it's got a lot more of a chance at being real, unlike Nathan Buckley's wholesale slaughter of the English language in his use of the newly discovered verb 'evolutionise'. It just goes to show that footballers should not be allowed anywhere near a word processor. They just end up disabling spell check with their ego based reality distortion fields and ruin everything. On the other hand, for some reason I don't mind Robert Murphy's column too much even if it really has next to nothing to do with football. It's certainly less objectionable than say, Grant Thomas' stint at The Age a couple of years back. Reading his column you'd never know he had a chip on his shoulder the entire time...

Well I've been so busy lately I haven't even had time to update my poor old blog, what with its multiple obscure references to Toto and the Backstreet Boys. I have to make an apology to my blog at this moment in time due to the fact that I, like all inconsiderate partners, have forgotten its birthday. As of last Monday, Say Something turned two years old and is now crawling along nicely while spewing all over my fine china and shattering my carpet into a thousand pieces. During this time I have covered a lot of ground, from work to uni and a hundred random YouTube videos in between. Hopefully I'll be able to keep doing so for a long time to come. I've come to treat this blog as an odd combination of a personal journal and poorly thought out joke depository, waiting for the day when I can look back at the old posts and wonder what the hell I was on and use some of said bad jokes for a sketch show starring Tandy as a break dancing Asian cricketer with an awful secret. I don't know what that secret is yet but that's how they write shows like 'Lost' or 'Today Tonight' - just make it up as you go along.

Too late to make a thoughtless gift for my beloved blog? I'd rather not bring down the mood on this post by talking about my stupid time consuming, life sapping studio so I'm going to give you something else. If you pay enough attention to this blog then well done, restraining orders will be in the post in the coming weeks. Otherwise you'd know I'm currently working on a paper on the architecture of virtual space, in particular computer games. It's a great way of combining the things that I love most and it certainly keeps me motivated enough to make me want to see it through. Have a read in your spare time, it's about 2000 words so it'll easily take a few moments of your time. Suggestions are more than welcome.

For some insane reason Google Docs won't allow me to publish PDFs via the web. Someone really needs to pay attention over there. So for now here's the text only version , I'm afraid you'll have to imagine the pretty pictures all by yourselves. Join me next time when I wander the premises after dark.

I have to say, it's pretty satisfying finally getting to read good press about your football team. In a petty stupid way it's an endorsement of your own beliefs, much in the same way talkback radio hosts berate their callers just for having a slightly different opinion, or how religious zealots keep insisting we non believers are all going to hell so that they feel better about their own conflicted existence. Okay, that may have been off topic somewhat but the feeling still stands. To an extent you could argue supporting a sporting team is a lot like choosing a religion - it feels pretty good for the most part but in the end it probably counts for very little. Collingwood supporters are certainly not the chosen ones, that's for sure. Heaven for one thing would certainly have more stringent dental and personal hygiene requirements, that's all I'm trying to say. Here endeth the lesson.

Regardless, all blasphemy aside this bout of press is quite fun to read and reread. While I certainly know how much maligned people see our chances in September and how we're just making up the numbers, this is all old hat material I have come to expect to read in the media. At least with this Monday's post mortem editorials the bigwigs Sheahan and Connelly have taken a small portion of their spiels to let everyone know that we're not as bad as we used to be, certainly better than last year at the very least. Though really everyone knows that at the end of September chances are one team of a felinesque moniker will hold that flag up high, no one really seems to mind as they go about preparing for their own finals campaigns. Having said that, I'm not sure how much finals experience we need to make more than two weeks of finals. Clearly the year before we were outclassed by sides more experienced at this kind of action. Hopefully we can go a bit further this time round.

In other football related news, I was watching Seven News for some reason and heard that Nathan Buckley's tips for the year to date totalled 101 or so. Well I am pleased to say I am tipping better than Nathan-freaking-Buckley right now on 109, so where's my personal football tipping segment on the evening news? Introducing Justin's tips for the round... "Who?"

Some families have special days out to places like the beach or the fairground, you know, something to do as a family unit that we will treasure forever and perhaps someday tell our kids, or someone else's, I'm not too fussed. But not my family. Our idea of a family outing (Not that kind of outing, though that would be interesting depending on what you accuse them of. My personal favourite is witchcraft - you can use the pyre for a good barbecue afterwards.) comes in the forms of trips to the dentist. I suppose it makes life a bit easier if we all just got our annual checkups over and done with in one shot, but it is really overkill to make it a family event of discomfort and potential pain. Coincidentally this is not unlike the experience of watching an episode of Gunther's ER on SBS or being forced to sit through four consecutive screenings of Two and a Half Men reruns that have accumulated on your hard disk recorder because your dad insists on watching it at a later date. Delete them already!

Okay, now to stop my whinging for now, for I have no real reason to. For my teeth are the best in the land as far as I'm concerned. Despite the obvious beatings I will endure after she reads this, the dentist did comment that I have much 'better teeth than my sister'. So I did the only thing a sensible person in my position could do - walk out of the room with the biggest grin on my face. I continued this pattern of stupidity for the rest of the day, winning arguments simply by flashing a grin. Must remind myself to buy a mouthguard for future encounters, lest I wake up in the middle of the night with a cricket bat in my mouth.

I firmly believe the secret to good dental health lies not just in regular brushing and rinsing habits, but being scared into the entire routine at an early age. I have vague memories of the mobile dentistry showcase coming to my primary school in Year Two like some sort of mobile torture roadshow here to make your afternoon miserable. Apart from that, you would have to factor in the competency, patience and sobriety of the dentist. Going through a hundred prep aged kids probably isn't the best way to relax, and at that age you really wonder if that drill could take out a good chunk of your cheek. Fortunately I have no such problems now as I breeze through checkup time and come out smiling as if it were a competition. As they say, winners are grinners. Or is it the other way round?

But of course karma, the great equaliser struck back when I was promptly crushed by a falling piano outside the dental clinic.

Well I sort of lied about that one. But having your football team lose to your sister's football team falls within the same area of concern. Is this the point where I lose all faith in humanity? Is there a black hole waiting for me the moment I get up off the couch? Oh that's right, it's just a game. But what a hurtful one it is.

Actually by now it's beginning to wear off a bit, but what the hey. It's not every day you knock off an opponent when the odds are more than $5 for your side to win. It's an even rarer day when you bother showing up despite said odds.

So in the meantime, insert evil laugh here...

I did promise you many tales of football spectating glory the other day, and I shall try not to disappoint. One story by itself doesn't seem to have enough content to fill out 500 - 600 words anyway, so this does make things far easier. Or at least that's how long I think my posts go for, I never bother with a word count... maybe I should, I'm not trying to write War and Peace here...


Chapter One - Life Changing Bullshit Ideas

Our first story takes place during Round 13: Kangaroos v Bulldogs at the MCG. Originally I wasn't planning on going, even though it was Glenn Archer's 300th game. The only thing really stopping me was the awful weather, which really could've been a lot worse given we live in Melbourne, where all four seasons can be experienced in one day. Luckily Darren and Marcus had been itching to see a game of footy as of late, and since Marcus's team wasn't in town and Darren didn't have a team to begin with, my team was chosen as default. Go go default!

Lunch at Hungry Jack's was good, even if it took us a long walk up and down Swanston Street before deciding on lunch. Here, we put our entrepreneuring (yes I know that's not a word... but "lawyering" is...) caps on and invented a new way for Americans to gain weight at exponential rates. You see, for hundreds of years people have enjoyed the wonderful sensation of freshly squeezed grease on their favourite burger or milkshake of choice. But what about all the other food groups left out in the cold without that slippery sense of self satisfaction? It'd certainly be the kick in the arse breakfast cereals have been missing for years.

Enter the crazy new world of Bacon Spray. Not feeling sufficiently clogged up inside? Are those pesky arteries getting in the way of a good midday nap? Well now you'll be able to chow down any meal, snack or blood transfusion with a generous helping of Bacon Spray, a completely 100% substance made from pure goodness of natural lard, just the way Mother Nature intended it to be! Imagine the benefits. Is butter simply not passing mustard on that slice of toast? Bacon Spray will solve that problem for good! Feel like eating a piece of your own clothing? Bacon Spray will chemically crispen (or crispify) that unwanted shirt you were never going to wear anyway. Find yourself walled up in an old fireplace by your arch enemy? Never fear, Bacon Spray can also be used as a corrosive and can burn away most organic and non organic materials, leaving them tasting great so you can eat your way to freedom! Now that's a gift anyone can enjoy.

Strangely, I had never been to a game of footy at the G' before. But using my superior sense of direction attained from hundreds of cricket matches, I was able to at least pretend to know where I was leading the party. Once we had settled down up in the 3rd tier of the MCG, we were ready to enjoy the match. Petrie managed to steal the show with six goals in the first quarter alone, and by the end I was boldly predicting a score of 200+ by the way we were going. Of course, linear projection doesn't usually work too well when it comes to sports, or anything else for that matter now that I think of it. Oh well.


Chapter Two - Yet Another CSI Spin off?

The following week, I went along with Kavi, Daniel, Josh and a couple of friends of his to the match between Geelong and Essendon at the Dome. I was impressed Josh was even able to get tickets, given that the game had been sold out as of Friday. Even one of my bosses, who is possibly twenty times the football fan I am couldn't get enough tickets to feed his ravenous brood of Essendon supporters. I guess it beats being a family of Collingwood supporters. Cue dental jokes here, possibly one where they only have one complete set of teeth between them.

As per usual, Josh was late, but really it was nothing we weren't already used to. It's written into your DNA as far as I'm concerned. Just like my love of all things elephantine (check my Facebook pic for confirmation). It's nice to meet up with all the guys again, it feels like it's been such a long time, and indeed it has been far too long. It doesn't seem quite right. But it is very easy to lose contact especially when you work full time and you don't really feel like doing much by the time Friday rolls around. That's something I have to change for sure, the sooner the better.

Being a neutral third party at a footy match is very different. For one thing, you normally wouldn't care who wins or loses as long as there is a good game to be seen. In this instance I didn't really have a grudge against either team so I was more or less impartial. I just enjoyed watching my Cat supporting friends bag their own team even at the first hint that they were losing, and watching my Bomber supporting friends wince with every goal that slowly made up the difference between the two teams at the end. It's the entire spectacle that makes live events worth watching, so even if you don't have a team, the game can still be fun to watch.

The entire event was slightly sullied when something of the liquid variety fell on my head. At first I thought it was just the rain, but then I realised this was Telstra Dome and the roof was sealed shut. A leak perhaps? My answer was soon to come when I put my sunglasses on and ran my finger through a bit of it and took a whiff of it, CSI style like that red headed guy who can't act and has the worst one liners ever. "Looks like someone went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out." Good god that's awful. Funny, but awful.

Upon further inspection back at the lab/my nose, it turns out I was doused in beer from the guys standing up in the row behind me. Ugh. If I wanted to smell like beer, I would've just gone ahead and had a couple of drinks myself, not partake in a rain dance of beer. Though really the smart thing to do would be do just open my mouth, stretch my neck backwards and steal a few drops of light strength beer. I really shouldn't have feared if they were to retaliate, I'd just casually pull out my trusty old can of Bacon Spray and burn their eyes to cinders.

Ah, Simpsons quotes. That's what spending a lifetime stuck in front of the TV, aka Surrogate Parent Number 1, does to you. To almost everyone else my age, the utterance of a random quote will send the room into hysterics. Unfortunately, the oldies don't always get it though my parents know a couple of lines that we like to do the rounds with from time to time. You know that's entertainment the entire family can enjoy. Too bad the quotes have been left wanting as of late... so long to the golden age of The Simpsons... that Simpsons Movie had better be good, or else.

Of course this quote and overly long preamble has to lead into something sports related, so I may as well start right about... now. I managed to persuade my sister into going to another footy game. From the title, you may have already guessed that it was her team versus my team. Overall, the game was fairly entertaining for the most part, with a minimum amount of slow controlling footy which our game is currently transfixed with. The scoreline was close, but I'm not really here to provide a commentary on how our teams went. No, I wish to discuss my behaviour after the game.

You see, my team managed to not lose the game as football teams I support are often prone to do. Which inevitably triggered a reaction from myself involving a bit of gloating in front of my sister. After all there when you have bad losers, you also have bad winners. And I am about to admit I am very much guilty of being in the latter category, as the following pictures will attest.

As you can probably tell from the title, I decided to trudge my way to the footy last night. As is my want, my sis and I left the house late and showed up at the Dome near the end of the 1st quarter. As we approached the giant screen outside the ground, I squinted into the distance to try and figure out how much we were losing by... little did my eyes realise that I indeed was not suffering some sort of severe brain hemorrhage when the scoreboard read 7.1 to 0.4!

At this point in the narrative, if you happen to be reading this from some place that isn't Australia, you may be wondering what the hell I'm on about. You see, around this neck of the woods, the dominant form of gladiatorial combat is Aussie Rules Football, or Footy for short, due to our tendency to truncate any name to two syllables or less that ends in an 'a', 'o' or 'y'.
With most forms of football, the aim is to kick the ball between a pair of posts at the opposite end. But with our form of the game, you get a consolation prize should you fail to kick straight, which is where that little number after the dot comes in.
Why do we reward people for not being able to kick properly? Beats the crap out of me, quite honestly. But once you get past that minor tidbit, you can really begin to enjoy the game for the spectacle of the contests as the players struggle to gain and keep control of the ball. And if one thing's for sure, you don't argue the finer rules of the game with a rabid toothless diehard fan who's too drunk to be coherent. Top marks if you can identify the club I'm thinking of...

But anywho, back to my original topic. The game itself was very entertaining, with the Swans only being able to claw a goal back right until the 4th quarter, when all hell broke lose and they came within a kick of taking the lead. But some brilliant defence from our boys saw us home.

All in all, the match was pretty damned good, if not for this one kid who kept staring at me throughout the game. At first, he was looking at the delicious bag of food we had brought in to prevent ourselves from suffering a horrible physical death at the hands of starvation, as well as the even more excruciating demise of having to pay for food inside the stadium itself. I mean, paying a premium for hot food at a sporting event is considered the norm, but when you end up paying $12 for what can be barely described as a 'serving' of fish and chips, you really wonder why you bothered going in the first place.
Even after we had finished our food, he still found ways to pivot his face in my general direction. Sometimes he appeared to be looking at some of the North fans sitting behind me, but more often than not he ended up staring at me for no apparent reason.
At one point, after we had kicked a vital goal to prevent Sydney from coming back, I just decided to scream something along the lines of, "Yeah that's right, turn around and look at me now!" (I should've screamed all that in capitals, but really that's way too much... the Internet has enough people misspelling [hmm, my spell checker tells me there are two 'ss'es in that word... shows what I know...] words and capitalizing words or letters that need not be)

After the final siren sounded, the Sydney fans were the first to leave, as you could expect. I managed to snap a pic of my serial starer as he departed with the rest of the vanquished... there he is, in the striped top jogging down the steps (allegedly of course, 'Ach, you wanna get sued?').
Overall, it was a pretty good night to be at the footy, and it was definitely a good one for the 'Roos to win against the odds, if you believe everything you read in the papers. Personally I tipped them to win, which shows off my ability to foresee insignificant sporting events - a rare gift, I'm sure. Though I failed to tip the Hawks and the Pies... another so and so week in the tipping comp... 'sobs'. Hmm, this post is getting a bit long, must consider cutting it up next time, haha.