Install a Rheem, cop a ream, and spear your Queen

In this week's Religion segment we explored Madonna the SuperJew, particularly the most critical issue of whether she was hot or not at 51, or whether she'd lost it with the onset of her conversion to Kabbalaism and general old age. The nays had it. Sex and religion: inseperable at Pub Night.

It was agreed that Wikipedia, if not actually a superior source of all esoteric knowledge than Kabbala, was at least a belief system shared by a broader range of internet geeks than any religious work, with the added flexibility of being in a constant state of revision without the need for holy war, or even a schism.

I regaled the group with lengthy but immensely witty tales of my adventures in Hollywood, of the wild parties, limo rides, beer consumption and general excess until even I became aware that perhaps I had gone on about myself for a microtad too long.

We discussed how difficult it was to correctly spell something like a chronic, progressive inflammatory arthritis primarily affecting spine and sacroiliac joints, causing eventual fusion of the spine due to Microsoft's apparent inability to provide a functional Australian English spellchecker in the Mac OS X version of Office.

It was agreed that since Australia had completed diverting enough funding from healthcare, education, roads, policing, environmental management, sustainable energy, gambling, smokes and booze to train up an Olympics team able to win as many gold medals as countries fifty times more populous, the fun had rather gone out of thrashing (deep breath) Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Brunei Darussalam, Cameroon, Canada, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Cyprus, Dominica, England, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Ghana, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, India, Isle of Man, Jamaica, Jersey, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Montserrat, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Scotland, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, The Gambia, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Wales, and Zambia.

(The Zambians really need to think laterally and rename their nation AAAZambia, or they'll spend the next century same as the last one - by the time they get to leave the stadium and get back to the party marquee, there's only Jatz and some fuzzy cocktail franks left, plus maybe some flat Diet Pepsi).

It has since occurred to me that in 2010 we should propose (a) adding a new demonstration event (because you could only do it once) in which athletes attempt to bring down a member of the British Royal Family with a javelin, discus, hockey stick or other piece of recognised sporting equipment; and (b) we should propose to the games organisers that we make the event "Australia vs All The Other Hopeless Sporting Nations Together In One Team", if only to drive the ratings up. Think: "Friday Night Games" with a once-off final appearance from the British Royal Family.

In fact, looking at that list of tin-pot tiny little countries, each without enough middle-class tax-payers to rip off in order to pull together a half-decent sporting team, I find myself with a new-found respect for history's great invaders and colonisers - was it really all about oppression, or was it some foresighted leadership thinking, "how am I going to build a world-class swimming squad out here in the Mongolian steppes without a standing body of water bigger than a yak's arse for a thousand leagues?"

From then on things generally devolved into our weekly an4l reaming segment, this week featuring a priceless disclosure from Banana: that if you're unfortunate enough to be admitted to the emergency department of our nation's finest public hospitals, you're losing blood and they can't easily establish why, the doctor charged with saving your life is almost certainly going to give your bottom a good going over with his gloved and greased digit. It's more of an age-old tradition than medical technique, it seems; apparently following the shooting of President Abraham Lincoln the doctor called upon to save his life did his best to keep the President's blood pressure up by repeatedly jamming his finger up his great leader's sphincter. There's no question that being assaulted this way would elevate the blood pressure of a fully conscious man, but modern medicine has apparently debunked it as a restorative measure when applied to the imminently deceased.

Nevertheless, Banana reports that physicians are loath to lose their an4l reaming privileges, and now justify it as a means of ensuring there's no mystery haemorrhage somewhere up the billabong (either I've spelled "haemorrhage" correctly the first time or Microsoft's spellchecker still sucks, by the way.) Even now, one of our nation's foremost accident and emergency departments is planning a clinical trial to establish once and for all whether a thorough an4l reaming from your friendly MD is more or less likely to lead to your untimely death. Banana had us all in stitches... of the other kind.

Darcy, it appears, has no fear of getting up close and personal with toilet bowls after his years in the Navy, and reports the results of an informal clinical trial of his own, conducted in two separate observations of a female acquaintance's digestive records many years apart and her consistent veering to the left when making a drop. Either, he suggests, the result of a trip to the hospital emergency department, or perhaps an inherited malfunction that might in fact benefit from a little adjustment from a trained medical specialist searching for internal haemorrhages. We may never know for sure.

Bozza took us further still up the dark, winding river of memory by retelling a tale from his childhood; a brief stay in the surreal desert-enclosed suburbia of Bakersfield, USA that was only really long enough for Bozza to leave an indelible impression on the restroom facilities of his unexpecting neighbours, who must be even now flipping through 500 channels of nothing on, happening across the 2006 Commonwealth Games coverage and wondering how the hell a nation of people who can't even hit a disconcertingly splashy American toilet bowl (so different to the 'deep dish' design we're used to in the Commonwealth nations) with their own outgoings can ever hope to achieve a gold medal in the netball. And yet, we do.

Finally, this one wasn't discussed at Pub Night last night because it's just too damned depressing, but nevertheless we should pause to give it some thought. Perhaps there is such a thing as paying too high a price for success in international competition...

And that is all I can recall from last night's Pub Night.

Red and pink bits:

The banana blog. Topics tonight included Rules and Chaos theory, red
and pink bits, Factionalism, Schools. Pressure and stress

With the onset of the rules the rebels have come out of the woodwork.
Some consideration was given to the need for rules and the existence
of pre rule pub night. Have we institutionalised the night? Can an
organised structure exist without rules? Do we need rules to live by?
Is the pub night big enough to accommodate the rebel forces and grow
from the diversity? The forces of Chaos embodied in Darcy Vader appear
to have been defeated as the rebel forces come into their own.

Alan Skywalker the wordsmith and Miles Solo having a go have clearly
set the pace. Jabba the banana is happy to side with the rules as long
as he gets the princess dressed in a school girl uniform shackled to
the base of his throne. Darcy Vader is man enough to stand on his own.
He bides his time.

Super sized Jesus briefly returned but with no mention of reaming
quickly ascended to the abode of God and the angels after some
discussion about resolving the conflict that exists in John 16 (the
bit about getting whatever you ask for). We were introduced to the
concept of red bits in the bible which are juicer than pink bits.

For the rest of us, there are some bibles that colour the J-mans words
in red to make them stand out. This happens a lot around John 16. Pink
bits are still pink bits.

Now it has come to our attention that the google ads targeting this
blog have been for tacky preachers that cant be bothered writing their
own sermons. Cool. Welcome tacky preacher.

Factionalism. Why were we never taught Australian political history at
school? Who gives a flying F**k about WW1 and 2. we can learn enough
about that watching "the world at war" reruns. How will we ever learn
about all the stuff that went on before we learnt to tune in to 702?

Schools. Are parents caught up in the hype? What the hell are we doing
discussing schools. I just finished studying last year. I don't want
to talk about schools.

Parting comments included a brief discussion about pressure versus
stress. Pressure , when there is too much stuff to get done and stress
when there is a software conflict in the form of cognitive dissonance.
But this needs to be discussed more

And congratulations to Roderick on the birth of his son Otis. A fine
looking Lad. The second born son of a second born son. Will he make of
the world what the world will make of him, or will it be the other way
around?

And that all I recall of last nights pub night.