Rhinos Write Up 2008

Being one of the few literate members of the Adelaide University Hockey Club, I am often turned to by other club members in times of trouble and need. For most AUHC members, these troubling, needy times are mostly at the end of the year when each team has to collar someone to squeeze out the interminable annual team report.

You know the one: "We played well, we had fun, we didn't win a grand final, but we did drink beer and play hockey". It all gets printed out and put in a cute little booklet on the tables at the End of Year black tie event where we all get trophies and try our damnedest to get barred from another function venue.

And every year, just about a week before the event, a stern group email is sent to all coaches:
"Get your team reports in!"
which is then forwarded by those coaches to their teams:
"Please, does anyone want to stick their hand up for this? Please please please!"
Which then, inevitably finds its way to me:
"Uh, come on Franzy - you do a good one every year. Can I leave this with you?"
To which I reply:
"As long as I can write whatever I want and don't have to bother with minor details like "results" and "reportage"."
Of course, by that stage, no one is in any position to say "No, I think we'll have a sensible write-up with game-by-game results and a level-headed commentary on the overall season this year" and so, I come up with things like this. And, even after that effort I still get asked back, even though I neither played, attended nor paid much attention to the results of my old team. They still came a'knocking at my door.
Silly buggers:

2008 Rhinos Write-Up

How did the Rhinos do this year? It is … difficult to tell. You may as well point at Grand Final winning Hawthorne and ask whether they are sportsmen, or GODS.

No, on second thoughts – you shouldn’t do that. The answer is clear: Hawthorne are a feather-boa-wrapped flock of mincing dandies who are currently clearing a place among their teddies for the Guinness World Record Certificate for Most Consecutive Homers Pulled in an AFL Season. And that was in spite of the Prada bags and Blahnik heels the boiis in brown and custard insisted on playing in all year.

The Rhinos aren’t like that. Not even close. Any similarities between a Haw-Haw-Hawthorne player and a Rampaging Horned Impaler of the Nigerian Outback (R.H.I.N.O.) are utterly false, unverifiable and such claims will leave you open to a little impaling yourself (boys and girls, form an orderly queue).

‘But they both played in a grand final this year!’ I hear you squeak, desperate for recognition.

No. No they did not, sir. Hawthorne played in a grand final. The Rhinos didn’t.

‘They both play a sport?’ you try, once again attempting to subvert the dominant paradigm.

Nope. There’s that word again. Now, let me explain something to you, my friend:

Hawthorne plays.

Rhinos trample.

Other hockey teams play. Rhinos conquer. They demolish, destroy, debunk, decaffeinate and deflower. You play hockey. The Rhinos pillage.

Fun Fact: No Rhino has ever been a member of an orchestra or any kind of musical ensemble. The few times some foolish person ignored the old adage “A Rhino does not play, a Rhino wins”, always resulted in a lot of desiccated musical instruments and defeated saxophonists.

It might seem a little like overkill to link such claims of violence to the Rhinos’ hockey style in what is meant to be a non-contact sport. ‘Overkill’ is also an interesting and accurate choice of words. By the time the minor rounds had finished this year, no fewer than eleven episodes of Crime Stoppers had been dedicated entirely to Rhinos vs Whatever Cannon Fodder Dared To Show fixtures. Did anyone catch the True Crime Special on the Rhinos last week? How good was the bit where the guy’s head exploded after Fongy’s drag-flick?

So, you begin to understand how difficult it is to simply classify and explain the 2008 Rhinos Season in terms of ‘victory’ and ‘game play’ when the former is a given for any Rhino ever born and the latter is something Hawthorne players do in the change rooms between manicures.

In 2007 the Rhinos became heroes. Parades closed down the city. Stamps were franked. Commemorative plaques bloomed like Murray River algae. Special issue coins were pressed and there was a time where you couldn’t feed a parking meter without putting a Rhino into it.

‘How long shall we park for?’

‘Put in two Greenmans and a Pinhead,’ you’d say before trotting off to do some shopping down the now-more-aptly-titled Rhino Mall (unlike the Rhinos, John Rundle certainly wasn’t endowed with huge balls of polished steel and so it only made sense to change the name. A plan to replace the current scale models with life-sized replicas was on the cards, but the most of the steel required has since been appropriated by the state government to build a desalinisation plant).

In 2008 the heroes passed on into legend. Everything the Rhinos touched turned to gold and when they touched gold it turned into delicious BBQ chicken which, after eating, would be digested and shat out as diamonds. Whatever the temporary name for Burbridge Road was is now slated as Rhino Rumble. New congregations are springing up all over the city with hundreds, verging on thousands, flocking to hear the lilting tones of St Frenchie preaching from the horn-ed pulpit. Rhinology is being taught through the schools and universities of the country, ensuring that by 2010 our great land will be protected from the credit crisis, global warming and space alien laser attack.

Like all legends, this glory was built on the freshly hacked bones of their adversaries. Metro 3 Men, wicked and weak, all attempted to sully the name of Rhino with the hockey equivalent of your little sister’s first ballet recital (but with hockey sticks) and all payed the ultimate price. Their humiliation shall be magnified on into the pages of history as they are remembered, not as hockey ballerinas, but as the last, stumbling, faltering step which evolution took in that doomed direction before cutting short and winging off into the pure sunrise of Homo Rhinoceros.

***
GTH - Miles came out strongly, but faded early for failing to take the picture into account. He will receive an automatic point when he inserts a necessary apostrophe into his blog title. Arch-rival Shippy, therefore takes a point, as does old-time competitor, T-to-tha-double-O Sam for reminding me of the complexion gag (ha).

Men are generally sneaky fuckers

Here's how it happened: I used to work at The Eagle On The Hill. This was a pub turned Last-Drive-Thru-On-The-Interstate turned fine-dining restaurent turned Schnittie-Tuesday-Local. It turned other things after I was fired for asking for too many Friday and Saturday nights off (every Friday and Saturday), but this story isn't to do with that.

EOTH had a great view over the Adelaide Plane. Evening dinner guests would always try to book the few tables which perched right by the window so that they would have something decent to gaze at other than one other wolfing down chicken schnitzels the size of paving stones. It could even be described as romantic and most nights there were a couple of bookings of 'table for two, rum for four'.
There was even a motel downstairs. You know what I mean. That's right: 'Room for the night, thanks mate. Send down another bottle of Nepenthe.'
Anyway, you get the tone. Romantic and affordable. The way to every man's heart, (but surprisingly few women).
This one night I was on front of house, greeting customers. My job was to say hello, show them to a table, pull out their chairs and (after pushing the chairs back in) take their drink order and any subsequent shit a nervous first dater might feel it necessary to dish out in order to feel like a big man.
These two didn't just arrive, they rocked up. Nobody 'arrives' in a Commodore ute with truck mud guards. He was resplendent in Ed Harry's finest party shirt and she had decided on a dazzling silk-look halter-neck gown complete with black lacy bra, all designed to perfectly accentuate the large piping shrike tattoo on her shoulder blade. A true South Aussie girl and well worth a night of wining and dining at the famous EOTH.

Now pay good attention because it's going to move quickly from here.

I smile.
I show them to the prime table, front row centre for the night lights of Adelaide.
I pull out her chair.
She sits.
I ask her what she'll have to drink this fine evening.
He tells her to get whatever she wants.
She orders a Bundy and coke.
I pull out his chair.
I ask what sir will have.
He remains standing.
Eye to eye with me he says, 'Large pineapple juice, thanks.'
He winks.
He grins.
He sits.
The end.

Men are generally sneaky fuckers.

* If you don't understand, ask a man over the age of sixteen. If he doesn't understand, he's lying.

***

GTH - Mele was close, but Miles takes it away. Two from two. Nobody else gets points because nobody accused me of being a sneaky fucker (even though I just about burst a damn kidney not laughing in the story above) for fabricating the entire tale of Johnny Wade: Stephanie Rice Picture Tearer Upper.

"... finally throwing the pieces into the air and yelling 'Snowstorm'."??

Come on! That's gold!

Australia's Newest Shame

Investigative journalism is really getting into the cracks these days. Just when you think it's another article about Stephanie Rice, you read to the end and suddenly we have a new villain:

"Last Friday was a time of anticipation and excitement for Sunshine Flowers pre-school student Kate Daly.
Kate was due to attend a swimming clinic on Sunday hosted by her hero Olympic Golden Girl Stephanie Rice and drew a picture of Rice to go with the flowers she had planned to give Australia's newest starlet of the pool.
Described by her friends and other parents from Sunshine Flowers as 'a little battler' and 'the truest Aussie around', Kate suffers from cystic fibrosis, has a life expectancy of just 10 years, and is forced to take 26 tablets a day to battle the disease. The swimming clinic is one of the limited range of treatments designed to extend cystic fibrosis sufferers' quality of life.

Enter Johnny Wade.

Known as 'a little terror', 'a definite candidate for pre-military-school' and 'a typical four year old boy', Wade seized on the much weaker Kate's drawing and tore it up in front of horrified staff and students. Unconfirmed reports say that Johnny was laughing and dancing as he destroyed the image of the triple gold medallist, finally throwing the pieces into the air and yelling 'Snowstorm'.

Four-year-old Johnny Wade's parents remained tight-lipped today after the youngster faced accusations of bullying, assault, destruction of property and defacing a national icon. Refusing to speak to media, they dashed into their modest home after facing the judge in a closed court session earlier today."

Is it going too far?
Not far enough?

***

GTH - Miles, Miles, Miles. Bullseye.

Boo Fucking Hoo

Why on earth should I give a fuck about a pack of spoilt rich kids behaving as such? Maybe I read The Age too much, but this has received national attention. Everyone is behaving as though these four-wheel-drinking-and-driving P-platers were going to behave any differently come muck-up day in a school which stakes most of its reputation upon the stunned mullets who managed to get a horse onto a balcony. Maybe they heard it was going to push back more, I don't know.
Xavier College famously suspended a couple of hundred of its larger breed of hormonal grunts earlier this week for creating a ruckus and breaking things in a posh area. Good. Except bad, because they all got to toddle off home to their Playstation 3s, their porn and their Sweet Sixteen Lexi to wait for Father to return home and reallign the planets so that the old scholars don't suffer the embarrassment of a thin reunion dinner ten years down the road.

Of course their parents all went bananas and threatened to sue if their little princes weren't allowed to take their $100,000 exams.

Boys + puberty + confined spaces - girls - responsibility + alcohol = a bunch of fuckwitted, blazer-clad penises running around your suburb and, given time and more money, your planet, fucking up your shit.

This is news?

How about " 200 Xavier students involved in a riot earlier this week were expelled for bringing the school into disrepute. "They will no longer be welcome on school property," said the principal today. "The expelled students may be able to access other options for completing their expensive education, but those options will only be open to these young men after a full year of community service."

How does that sound?
Ahhhh ....

***
Update - GTH - Point to Shippy for the creativity of the answer. I'm actually just giving him a credit because I don't understand it.

How the media works!

Thanks to Audrey's excellent, honest post, I was able to accurately answer Dad's question about last night's news coverage of the massive turnout at Britt Lapthorne's memorial service.

Dad: What the fuck are all these people doing there? They didn't even know her and they're showing up to her funeral? Just on the strength of what they saw on telly?
Me: Do you want to know why they're there?
Dad: Yes.
Me: I can explain it you in three steps.
Dad: Really?
Me: Exactly three steps.
Dad: Okay, go.
Me: She's cute. She's white. They're idiots.
Dad: Ahh ...

Thanks Audrey!

***

GTH will continue unchanged when I post blogs in quick succession to give everybody a chance. Sorry Shippy, your speed may have pushed you even further up the leader board.

How I was offered honours by pulling a Bradbury

One of the best and worst lecturers I ever had was in the last semester of my third year at uni. I had been slowly plugging away at various English and Cultural Studies-type subjects, all in the name continuing my big fish, little pond dominance of high school English, which surely pointed towards an immanent blast off into the interstellar fame and fortune offered by continuing to be good at reading and writing.
I had also continued to study Anthropology all the way through, somehow missing the discrepancy in grades between these two subjects which made up my major. I recently had cause to look over my thin little undergraduate transcripts and only then, with all the subjects and their grades lined up alongside one another, did I notice that in three years I only ever managed one single, solitary Distinction from Napier Building, Floor Six. Every other English grade was lined up nicely over the three years with a big, cheery 'C' for Credit. As in:

"You're a credit to yourself and your family in that you can use a spell checker, the library, a watch to remind you when the tutes were and a calendar to point out when the essays were due."

To demonstrate my Credit-honed grasp upon the beauty of the Mighty Scimitar of The English Language, I shall offer you the following sentence: My anthropology grades were exactly the same, in that they were the exact opposite.
I took just as many anthropology subjects as I did English ones and distinguished myself above other anthropology students and my own English grades time and time again.
Except, and now we come full circle, for that one little hiccough at the end of my final year.

Dr Power was not his name. I will not write his name to save him the embarrassment a self-google might bestow in years to come. He taught a very heady subject called 'Discourse and Power'. I know. I have no idea either, and I took the course. Myself and my two friends, Molly and Andy were the youngest people in the first tute by ten years. The two other youngest student, Craig and Anna, may have actually been near to our age, but Craig's soft, bushy beard and thin spectacles and Anna's dyed-black hair and tough leather jacket to match her tough eyebrows set them at quite a different atmospheric pressure to the floaty meadow breezes we three youngsters were used to.

I can't tell you what the course was about any further than its name. Dr Power was Sri Lankan and so used quite a lot of historical examples from modern Sri Lankan history to illustrate his wordy, complex points. Molly, Andy and I sat up up the back, madly writing useless notes and copying each other's useless notes.

During the first tute Dr Power gave us all his home telephone number with instructions to call with any course-related problems for a discussion any time up until about 11 o'clock in the evening. He explained with a benevolent smile that Sri Lankan households did note keep the same quaint early bedtimes as the Australian households he had experienced. There sounded as though there was much cooking, discussion and general activity in the Power household. Right up until 11pm.

He regularly took us over to The Mansions after tutes and bought us rounds of beers (only we three up the back shyly ordered schooners of ale, everbody else had water or juice). We all sat around trying to follow his leads on course discussion before breaking down into the customary get-to-know-you round the circle speeches before lapsing into further awkard silence and leaving.

A couple of weeks in, Dr Power handed back the first essays and sat quietly at the front of the tute on a chair while most of us worked down the gruel of our insanely low marks. When we could eventually gather the courage to meet our teacher's eyes, he was almost as shocked as we were. He was genuinely troubled. Most of us were all terrible. Particularly our little group of three up the back.
'I don't understand,' he said. 'There is such a discrepancy of marks! Some of you grasp the material quite well, but some plainly have almost no understand of the basic concepts we've been working with.'
We hung our heads.
'Do you ... do you talk about the material to each other?'
We glanced at one another. A couple nodded timidly.
'Outside this tutorial?'
The nodding ceased.
'Do you meet up to discuss your work?'
The absence of nodding continued.
'Do you perhaps even call or contact each other to go over the material?'
Apart from us three up the back, everybody else always left the class in different directions.
'You do not help each other outside this class?'
Head-shaking. Of course we didn't. The idea would have been laughable if there had been a few higher grades in the room to lighten the mood.
'That is a real shame. A real missed opportunity. Because students like Anna and Craig could really help students like Molly and Andy and Franzy.'

We were so shocked we didn't even get offended until about a fortnight later.

This story borrows nothing from The Mighty Ducks. I did not begin to improve. I continued to suck. But some of you will remember that I did escape with a credit for this course. Which is mysterious, given that my essays were so bad they could have sucked bowling balls up chimneys.
Here's how it went down. Or up:

At the same time, I was doing a gender studies course, one that I was quite good at and one that I ended up actually helping to run a year or two later. The fact that I was one of three boys in a class of fifty girls had nothing to do with my enrolment. Hey, I'm a learner. I wrote quite a good essay that examined the use of power in society with gender sprinkled on top. Or something. When it came time to hand up that final glorious essay which was to save me from failure (it was actually still possible to fail in those days, unlike today's courses which allow you to resubmit and appeal until you get the grade you paid for), I simply dusted off the larger chunks of gender studies and sprinkled on some of the bits of Sri Lankan history I had selected at random from our phone directory-sized reader. I slapped on a title which included the words 'Discourse' and 'Power', handed it up with a sigh and went on a very long and enjoyable road-trip to a music festival in Brisbane.

All the way there, I kept receiving messages from my parents. 'Call Dr Power', 'Dr Power is worried about your essay', 'Tell Dr Power to stop leaving messages', 'Why don't you call us once in a while?'.

I finally heard the message left by the deeply concerned Dr Power. He was extremely worried that not only had I handed in a gender studies essay to his subject, but that I had also handed up a brilliant Discourse and Power essay to my equally-confused gender studies professor.
I had to call him. I rang during the late afternoon when I was sure he mentioned something about Sri Lankan nap time, hoping to catch him relaxed and unaware.
'Some of these references are nothing to do with this course, are you sure this is not a different essay?'
The conversation on my part wasn't worth repeating. I mumbled, I prevaricated, I assured him that I wouldn't be handing in another essay and hung up.

He gave me a credit.

Although I never spoke to him again, somehow I'm sure he fobbed me off with the lowest acceptible grade possible so as be 100% assured of never having to deal with, or even speak to me again.

Or it was the typo that was cemented into history.

***
Please, once again, nip over to poetsquib and read another extended tale of my tepid youth. My first exposure to the most devout of choristers, I. Ron Butterfly ...

"...We drank in pubs, smoked in laneways and began really obsessing about these new things called “mp3s” which you could get from this wonderful computer program called “Napster” which used “the internet” for something other than email and postage-stamp-sized pornography. We installed ever louder and more impressive speakers into our cars so crap they were cool. Or maybe it was the other way around ..."

***

GTH - Shippy swoops in a plucks the points from all comers with a wonderfully-reflected metaphor and, in case anyone hadn't noticed, for the new write-up down on the Champions' Scoreboard. Give him a week and he'll be running this place without me.

A cutting review.

I know we all love it when I review children's books. I'm so witty. I'm so thoughtful. I'm so mean. How could I trash my peers so easily? Why would I say anything detrimental to that art of arts: writing? Why do I insist on shooting myself in the foot while punching my betters in the face? (Because, let's face it, they's published and I ain't).

Because they deserve it. I would expect the same and when I receive it, I will chew my knuckle in pain and make excuses and point fingers, but the reality is that you write for your readers, whoever they are. If they hate it and can articulate why, then that's your problem, not theirs.

***

Blade: Playing Dead and Blade: Closing In by Carnegie medallist, Tim Bowler, are the first and second books in a four part series. The story follows the eponymous Blade on his adrenalin-fuelled adventures around a present-day British capital city. Blade is a fourteen year old tough kid with university-grade street smarts and a past. He narrates the action in first-person present tense, addressing the reader as ‘Bigeyes’ (an excellent touch) and placing his captive audience squarely beside him with instructions to keep watch or admonitions to stop asking so many damn questions. His voice is original and believable and his modern day street kid lingo almost conceals the fifty-five-year-old author behind it, trawling chatrooms, blogs and networks, straining for the holy grail of young adult fiction: authentic, un-self-conscious cool.

The Blade books are, on the surface, gritty, exciting, compulsive reading. Blade himself is neck-deep in action from the first page; shoplifting, back-talking, battling rival gangs, mixing up with murder, crime and intrigue and doing it all alone. He refers to past events and tragedies while still hiding them from the reader, as though Bigeyes too, must earn his trust before he will elaborate on exactly what they have to do with his current circumstances.

The target audience (reluctant, young, mostly male readers) will appreciate the honest, uncensored action and violence. Nothing is glossed over or hidden for their protection: people get hit, beaten up, stabbed, shot and killed, but the story doesn’t call for gore and glorification of the violence. We experience see these shocking events through the eyes of a fourteen year old boy who isn’t happy about seeing them. The realism of the action flows through its restrained telling.
However, the gruff, mistrustful fourteen year old narrator does create a problem. Despite the attempts to explain his verbosity and thoughtfulness through his hidden past and some-time penchant for books, the entire mis-en-scene, as described in relentless stream-of-consciousness by Blade, is shallow and black and white at best. While this is a deliberate decision by Bowler to maintain the tough, realistic feel of the story, it does rob the audience of any real sense of the world in which Blade lives. He breaks into half a dozen houses and visits different parts of the city, but none really differentiate from the others. Setting feels entirely unimportant as Blade is either running from predators through identical streets, lanes and parks or hiding quietly from them in equally-interchangeable safe house locations. There is no real vivid picture painting going on, just minimalist exposition: dark, light, locked, un-locked, urgent, quiet. There are no colours, tastes or smells. Physical descriptions are limited to functional details relevant to Blade’s progress. The sparse prose certainly serves the purpose of not impeding the action, but action without place is just interpretive dance.

There have been better action sequences. Bowler hangs grimly to his formula throughout: trouble, escape, hide, repeat. A few of the afore-mentioned realistically portrayed acts of violence are sprinkled in for (slight) variation. Suspense is drawn from the reader like an expected curtesy rather than something the author has worked for. Blade spends about half of his time demonstrating his uncanny extrasensory perception (foresight, x-ray vision and mind-reading) and the other half making decisions based on completely ignoring those perceptions. Maybe there’s a reason for this confluence of sixth-sense and foolishness, but, two books in, no explanation has been forthcoming other than Blade’s irritating mantra, ‘Don’t ask how I know, I just know.’

This reluctance to outline base facts and the Blade series’ approach to character development and structure all point towards one clear fact: these books are a rip off. Rip. Off. A rort, a scam. A tricky little scheme to make money. The series is comprised of a series of four separate books, sold as such for $14.95 each. All released at once, each containing the covers of the entire set within their back cover.

The problem is that each book isn’t a stand-alone story, designed to be enjoyed both separately and as a part of the whole. The first two books, at least, contain only minor parts of a single story arc; they provide no solutions and implore the reader on their back pages to purchase the next instalment. There are only hints pointing towards the major points upon which the story hangs: where is Blade going and from where has he come? In order to learn the answers, young readers must spend the better part of simply to finish reading a story with all the markers of an urban thriller and none of the intriguing charm. Blade should have been sold as a single book. There are no chapters to divide events into manageable sections for younger readers and the tone and subject matter both point towards an audience of an age easily able to deal with longer texts. As an artistic exercise this series is the equivalent of selling four full-price tickets to one movie and just as reprehensible on the part of the producers.

Coupled with the current fashionable hysteria in Britain over knife attacks (Blade, predictably, is a master with a concealed weapon), the Blade series reeks of savvy publishers striking while the iron is plugged in and ready to press the party shirt of the Zeitgeist. Dividing a single B-grade story over four separate, full-priced novels is a truly masterful piece of marketing at the expense of artistic product and the pockets of reluctant readers.

***
GTH - Shippy, Squib and River are all kicking goals and being awarded points. It might seem like a rip off, but it's really not!