If pain persists, please see your doctor. Apparently trying to kill yourself with Panadol is the wrong way to go about things. It is a popular way for the ladies to commit suicide; gentlemen prefer more direct methods—gunshots, slit throats, that sort of thing. But in this case, for once, the blokes have it right.

The pills require a particular dose. Too much and the drug acts as a purgative and you puke it up and meanwhile it has done terrible damage to your kidneys and you die an awful, painful, humiliating death of renal failure a fortnight later.

But then not enough and you just wake from a coma with a bad headache—oh the irony.

So don't bother with the Panadols. Too much trouble.

  ¶ 4:00 pm 1 comments

  Humour from two different wars “We were in ‘X Camp,’ soldiers under fourteen couldn't get in without their parents. Calling it ‘X’ for security was beyond comprehension because there, in foot high letters, was the sign ‘No 201 PoW Camp.’”
— Spike Milligan: Rommel? Gunner Who?

“Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it.”
— Found written on mirror in lipstick after Americans had gone through Falluja.

I don't know which I find funnier.  ¶ 7:00 pm 0 comments

  Robbed The day is only a couple of hours old and I've already heard several people tell me “we wuz robbed” and comment on the perverse injustice of the terrible penalty call at the end of the match.

This is the cry of the football novice—the bandwagon passenger. I am going to spend the day sighing through a number of these conversations getting relief in the thought that thereafter another word about football will not cross their lips for another four years.

It wasn't a penalty but Neill naïvely went down earlier than a cheerleader with a curfew (Neill had a superb tournament but he should know that lying down in front of a player with the ball at his foot is not an effective way of stopping him) and all Grosso had to do was to stroll up close to the body prone on the ground and then throw himself down next to it, at least eight out of ten referees would have given the penalty.

In a competition like this you are always going to get decisions like that go against you. You certainly don't have to like it. You can trudge home—as I did—fuming, aghast, not looking at the many hundreds of people milling about in the city as you pray you don't spot any celebrating Italians, but you can't pretend you were born with the right not to have such things happen to you.

Decisions were always going to go against Australia: think of the Japanese goal, think of the bizarre protection Brazil got—four times as many frees as Australia did—prompting Kewell's outburst, think of Poll's comedic genius in the Croatia game. But this is football and things went our way too: Kewell was lucky to get away with his little tizz, he was also lucky to get away with the equaliser in the next game when he was a metre offside, think also of Materazzi's soft red card this morning.

Referees get a lot of decisions wrong. It's that simple. If you happen to be an overwhelming favourite the mistakes often go in your favour. That is football. If you only notice it when it occurs in the final moments of a match in the knockout phase of the world's biggest sporting event then, I'm afraid, you've arrived late at the party.

  ¶ 11:00 am 4 comments

  Rev I'm at work and just made myself a soothing pot of tea. We only have low-fat milk in the fridge. OK yes I'm grateful that my generous employer provides me such resources but who the hell insists that I put low-fat milk in my tea?

Here's a secret, people: low-fat milk is just water dyed white. You have removed the only thing that makes milk milk. It is the fat itself that congeals in the tea, that cuts the harshness of the tannins and gives the smoothness to the feel in the mouth. Tea made from low-fat milk is shit. There I said it.

All you people who put low-fat milk in your coffee are deluding yourselves. You want to lose weight? It's not the 80mg¹ of fat in the dash of milk that's tipping you over the edge, Porkboy. We had pizzas put on for lunch here today and you should have watched how quickly those low-fat-milk-sculling weight-control-freaks snorted down those mozzarella-topped, saturated-fat-filled beauties…

If you will only drink milk if there is no milk in it then, here's a tip, don't drink milk. Soy milk and rice milk seem to be popular alternatives. Do what you want but don't make me drink your miserable, whiny, watery, low-fat, milk-simulating products with you.

  ¶ 2:30 pm 2 comments

  Fun times in Alice Springs I once spent an enjoyable three hours in Alice Springs. Yes, minutes of fun. Population of 28,178 in the most recent census. I didn't count them myself: I am such a damn fine citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia that I mindlessly trust my government to get such details right. However—and here, kittens, comes the killer fact—if you drew a circle around Alice Springs with a radius of 1,500 kilometres (that is, a diameter of 3,000 km) you would not find another 28,178 people in the area. This is the only area of land on planet Earth where you could do that.  ¶ 3:50 pm 2 comments