Sport and Religion in Australia

This is another copy of a blog that I sent to the 'Manchester Evening News', so it appears on the 'Net' somewhere else, but Odin (I already told you that I'm descended from the Vikings) knows where. So I am including it here as well, just in case you can't find it either, that's the sort of thoughtful, caring guy I am!

I have some statistics before me, these are ‘dinki di’ statistics compiled by the ‘Christian Research Association’ and printed in ‘The Melbourne Age’ a very august publication in much the same vein as ‘The Manchester Evening News’, not the usual crap that I make up off the top of my head. (To be honest with you, I just added that in case the inestimable editor of the MEN, stumbled on this in an idle moment).

Anyway, these stats reveal that of Melbourne’s population of 3.6 million, 1 million are Catholics and another million are made up of various Protestant groups ((are Anglicans, (400,000) Prods?)) and Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and other assorted odds and sods. That leaves over 1.5 mill or 42% who don’t claim to be anything.

That’s an awful lot of Godless bastards, in America 98.67% (alright! I admit it, I just made that up) claim to be church-goers. Over there if you claim to be an atheist, you’re only one small rung above being a paedophiliacal necromaniac with a shoe fetish.

So, what do these Aussies believe in? Well, you can go for twenty years working next to a person and never find out that they’re an Archdeacon in a Druidical sect, that practices animal/virgin sacrifices at every full moon. People just don’t talk about religion, apart from the door-knockers, Seventh Day Adventurists, PsuedoOlogists and clean-cut lads in suits from Salt Lake City.

However, you can’t go longer than twenty minutes without finding out which Aussie Rules Team they barrack for (We’re talking Melbourne here) different rules apply in NSW and Queensland, where they follow Rugby League Teams, but the principle is just the same.

In the AFL (Aussie Football League) there are 16 teams, one each from QLD and NSW, two from SA and WA and the rest from VIC. To function properly at all levels of society you HAVE to be a fan of one of these.

You can follow and participate in Crown Green Darts, Ice Soccer, Synchronised Swimming, Table Badminton, or Nude Beach Tiddly-Winks. Whatever takes your fancy , but you MUST follow an AFL club or you are a social leper.

So, what is this AFL you ask? Well, it’s a very quick, athletic game played between two teams of eighteen, very fit young men who attack a ball and try and kick it between four (not two) posts at either end of a large oval field. If they succeed, then a man dressed as an attendant in a lunatic asylum, waves white flags dementedly around and another similarly attired gentleman waves back at him from the other end of the ground.

This semaphoric routine indicates whether the ball went through the inner bigger poles, which scores 6 points in which case two white flags are flapped around maniacally.

The other alternatives are minor scores which go between a big pole and a small pole, this scores one point and only one flag is used. If the ball misses all the poles then no flags are waved and the crowd shouts obscenities at the player who missed. If he’s one of yours, these can be in an anguished tone, if he’s one of theirs then it should be in a jeering manner.

You also need to shout out obscenities at the umpires as they are always useless, blind white maggots of questionable parentage with exceptionally low IQ’s. As a newcomer to the game, it is highly recommended that you study a game on the TV before you attend an actual game. This is not particularly difficult to achieve as they are broadcast in their entirety (upwards of two hours) on Friday evenings and all day long and most of the night on Saturdays and Sundays.

This means that you can shout obscenities at your spouse (women are even more vociferous than men) all weekend and get away with it. Women love the game and why not? where else can they watch 36 young men in skimpy shorts, beating the crap out of each other? I know that I for one would be glued to the screen if there were games of beach volleyball, with 36 bikini clad beauties beating each other up and no net to intervene, but I’m a sicko!

Unlike most games, where the teams start off in their own half of the field and run like buggery into their opponents half, in AFL they all go anywhere they like, right from the start and then run around higgledy piggledy, trying to confuse everybody, including themselves.

If it’s like any other game, the one that comes closest is Gaelic Football, but they have an excuse, because they’re all Irish and it's expected of them. I won’t go into Aussie Rules any further at this stage, unless popular demand requires me to, as it would require a book, of which there are many available in all good book-stores and selected news-agencies.

Aussie worship of sport doesn’t end there of course, they love beating anybody, but especially The Poms. This is rooted in history, and there is no tradition stronger than that of Test Cricket. The Poms are just as bad of course, when they beat the Skips in England, the Queen knighted the bloody lot of them, including the ‘Sight Screen Movers’.

Not really giving much of a flying frolic who won, although I do enjoy watching test cricket. If the Poms were winning, I used to go into work and say “The Poms are going alright then”. If the Aussies were getting the upper hand, I’d wander in and say “Us Aussies are thrashing the arse off those Pommie Bastards, eh!”. This tactic caused great consternation among the Aussies and it pays to beat a hasty retreat if you’re about to get lynched.

I could go on about other sports, but I won’t mainly because I’m getting bored. Suffice it to say that if you are a sportsman or woman and you’re prepared to be naturalised (sounds painful) then Godzone is the place for you (not from a religious point of view of course). Look at ‘Aussie’ Joe Bugner for one, on second thoughts don’t It’s not a pretty sight.

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Cockroaches, Good Guys or Baddies?

I’ve written about these little buggers before, see ‘Local Warming’. Back then I was informed that there were three distinct types, Australian, American and Asian. However, a recent article in ‘The Newspaper of the Year’, a rather dubious claim at best, but who am I to argue with the august Melbourne Herald Sun?

This article was over half a page long, if you include the photograph, which could have been anything, from a common bed bug to a blue-ringed octupus. If you don’t believe me check it out on the net, page 7, Friday March 7, 2009. Written by Karen Collier (consumer reporter), under the headline Cockroach Invasion. You’d have to be a fool to argue with someone with those qualifications for cockroach research.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, I’ll give you a quick precis. Big, ugly cockroaches are invading Melbourne (quick, get me a Hollywood script-writer, this has great potential). Hold on though! “Before you panic, that intruder in your kitchen sink, bathroom or barbecue (?) is probably a harmless native“. Thank any Deity you prefer for that, I was just about to pack my bags and catch a slow boat to Wales.

It goes on to say “Unlike the nasty little German roaches that thrive on filth and food scraps, hide in the dark and carry disease” (remind you of any Germans you know? No, me neither!) “the common shining (black) cockroach munches on organic matter and breaks down leaf litter”.

It then quotes an entomology expert as saying “These ones seem quite stupid and don’t run when they see you” What do they do then? Rear up on their fucking back legs and challenge you to a fight? “They are not as cluey as the pests that use the cover of darkness” (Remind you of any Aussies you know? nor me!)

“if you can, try to return the natives outside, rather than killing them because they help return nutrients to the soil”.

I won’t go into the ‘Smoky Brown’ variety, as I have to keep my blogs short and interesting (which is an oxymoron, if you ask me, so don’t bother). But according to the article they are "yet another introduced pest", along with rats, rabbits and the British?.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I for one, am not going to try to interrogate any roaches in my bathroom and kitchen to find out if they speak German, Mandarin or ‘Strine’. I shall continue stomping on the bastards or karate chopping the little shits. Although, I might throw their corpses into the vegetable patch, to add nutrients.

Cheers,

SkyBlueSkull

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com

Local Warming, When you live in a place called Sunshine what can you expect?

LOCAL WARMING

Everybody has heard of Global Warming since Al Gore invented it, but that is ‘The Big Picture’, so it is now time to contemplate ‘The Small Picture’, how it affects me personally right now, not in 2040 when I’ll be dead anyway.

So this is a look at ‘Micro Meteorology’ as opposed to ‘Macro Meteorology’. Just remember that you read the term here first. Maybe I’ll appear on TV with a ‘cherry-picker and a pointy stick and make a big swag of money.

How is this warming phenomenon affecting me, you might ask? That was a rhetorical question meaning you, not me as in Skull. Well to be honest, I couldn’t really give a flying frolic how it’s affecting you, because this is about how it’s affecting Chateau Skull.

First off, the Chateau is now infested with cockroaches for nine months of the year. These horrible little beasties never used to be seen in the Chateau ten years ago, they always stayed north of the border in NSW because it was too cold for them down here in Melbourne.

This may not be strictly correct, we used to have ants, but then we got mice and the ants disappeared and perhaps the mice were eating them along with the baby cockroaches. We then got a cat (not through any pleading on my part I might add, I’m a bird and dog person). The cat has never been allowed inside the house, but it must have caught the mice when they went outside to get a suntan. This keeps them out of laboratories to be tested with all sorts of horrids, because labs prefer white mice, which is a bit racist if you ask me. But nobody ever has.

Anyway, I blame warming on both the profusion of cockroaches and shortage of white mice. Incidentally, I read somewhere that there are three different types of cockroach, Australian, American and Asian. Now this may be a bit of Nationalistic Jingoism, but the Aussie variety are apparently black and as far as cockroaches go are relatively clean. On the other hand the Yankee and Asian ones are brown and filthy. Make of that what you will.

To get back to ‘Local Warming’, here at the Chateau we have been experiencing a drought for the last ten years. Not a total drought you understand, but a distinct shortage of drizzle let alone persisting down rain. This means that the State Gov’t has passed an edict saying that we are only allowed to water plants (not lawns) twice a week before 8:00am. You are also not allowed to wash your cars and need a permit to fill your swimming pool.

As the Chateau is odd (in more ways than just the number) I get to water on Wednesdays and Sundays. I usually do this around 10:00am and if anybody asks, I tell them my body clock is permanently set to West Australian time. I also don’t drive and if my spouse’s car is dirty, I tell her to take it to the car wash. As for swimming pools, well! to be honest, we don’t have one.

When it comes to ‘lawns’, I have two, one at the front and one at the back. It does of course depend on your precise definition of a lawn. Mine do have some grass, but consist mainly of weeds. If they are mowed regularly they look like lawns, if you squint into the sunlight.

I must admit that I prefer summer when they turn brown and if you kick the weeds, clouds of dust rise up. This is basically because I’m a lazy sod when it comes to sods.

At the moment here at the Chateau we’re supposedly in the middle of winter, but somebody forget to tell Thor or whichever God is in charge of these things. (Might as well blame the Gods, nobody else is going to shoulder the responsibility). We keep getting a splatter of rain during the night and then a sunny day with temperatures in the low teens. This is perfect for weeds and always too damp to mow the buggers.

Cheers

SkyBlueSkull

PS. This is supposed to be the middle of winter and today it’s been sunny all day and the temperature has reached 18C. Luckily, I’ve taught the Good Lady Wife (GLW) how to mow and she decided to mow the front ‘lawn’.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com