It's been something over a Kennett-revival here in Melbourne over the last few days. This might not seem important to you out-of-towners but in a state where he polarised opinion so violently during his years as Premier it's been highly significant.

Half of the people in this state (myself included) are nostalgic for the days when he ruled us like a king, and the other half miss having somebody to blame for every minor thing that goes wrong in their lives. There were some second-rate comedians on TV years back singing a song to that effect; train running late in the morning? Bloody Jeff. Checkout chick at Safeway giving you lip? Bloody Jeff. Caught your wife in bed with the milkman? I think you can guess who's fault it was. And so it was in the Melbourne press over the last week,

* Traders discover loopholes to force employees to work for peanuts on Easter Sunday = Jeff's fault

* Bracks breaks a promise he made merely months ago that no tolls would be imposed on the Scoresby Freeway = Jeff again

* Commonwealth Games failing miserably, Harry Madden has no idea = Bloody Jeff

* Public Transport leaves a billion dollar hole in the Victorian budget = They might actually have a point there, but let's not have fact get in the way of a good story.

I've got some other things I'd like to condemn him for too. Global warming, the low quality of foreign pron on SBS and the fact that Melbourne haven't won a Premiership in nearly 40 years. He'll do as a convenient scapegoat for all that and more.

Then he made some ill-advised gag about doing a political comeback and every second-rate press gallery hack sprinted to their keyboards to write an in-depth analysis of what it meant for Victoria, the Liberals and Robert Doyle. Bloody Jeff my ass, who else would they write about when nothing else interesting was going on.

Face it, even if you hated his guts as Premier (which it seems quite a few people did) you secretly miss not having him around to bitch about don't you? I thought so.

Looks like Soccer Australia finally realised that the finals system they introduced to the NSL this year has been a debacle. Shame it took them five weeks into the ridiculously elongated playoff series to realise it. The solution to general national apathy towards the league was never going to be asking the clubs to play more games. If you want people to actually show up to a finals series you've got to make it more attractive than what they weren't bothering to show up to for the 26 weeks of the regular season.

Just a word of explanation for those who aren't clued up to the NSL (and let's face it, that's 99% of the population). Before this season started they ditched the traditional finals series format that is used in the AFL/NRL/NBL and replaced it with an idea they stole from the Swiss league. It's not exactly one of the powerhouse leagues of world football is it? They weren't even content with just pirating a mediocre concept from a mediocre league they actually tinkered with it so it would lead to a Grand Final between the two top sides.

When you have sides like the Northern Spirit who can barely scrape together a four-figure crowd (even with creative accounting that Charles Koppell would be proud of) scraping into the post-season with absolutely no hope of making the Grand Final it becomes farcical. Why would any of their remaining six fans bother paying for finals tickets (club members have to pay full price for the honor of watching this travesty) when they know even a couple of wins won't make their season amount to anything but a mid-table failure. In a real finals system they would stand every chance of lifting their game, causing a massive upset against one of the top sides and making it to the final.

In an article for the South Melbourne matchday magazine in November last year I declared a willingness to wait and see how the system worked before condeming it to the same scrapheap as first-past-the-post championships and North/South conferencing but as the season wore on it became painfully obvious that the finals were going to be a joke. They're being broadcast on Optus' Homeart channel, and that's a step up in prestige for the NSL for gods sake. By all rights Pete Smith should be doing the commentary.

Of course a fair percentage of soccer 'fans' would rather see 3600 strong crowds than 15000 as long as it means that 90% of the audience are of the same ethnic background as them, and while these people continue to treat the NSL as their personal foreign social clubs there's no way for the domestic game to go forward in Australia. And they'll be the first people to complain when their precious clubs go to the wall.

Speaking as I was earlier about the guy who does the crowd warmups at the MCG reminded me of the last person to hold down that role, the infamous Voice of the G.

(Actually I think they had Drew Morphett doing in for a bit last season, but he obviously wasn't wacky and zany enough for them. They should have played the footage of him absolutely pissed while he was presenting the Sandover Medal one year, that really would have gotten the kids interested.)

Now, as I've said here before I only started going back to the footy at the end of Melbourne's horrific 1997 season so I'm not quite sure how long this idiot had been at it but he lasted right up at least until the end of 2000, if not a bit longer (I may have blotted some of the horror from my mind).

Anyway, the first thing I thought when he appeared on the screen at that first game back from self-imposed exile (a shock 19 point win over Carlton) was "Hey, that's the wanker from the Colin Carpenter Show." And it was. I must have been the only person in Australia to remember his small and absolutely shithouse performance as Colin's roommate in that short lived show. If that wasn't bad enough it turned out his role was to do "zany" things on matchday like interview the crowd. Sadly the closest I ever got to his hillarious antics was shouting "WANKER!" at him outside the ground one day.

He was so irritating on a weekly basis that I actually recall the one funny segment he ever did. I can't pinpoint exactly when it was, or who was playing (although I have the sneaking suspicion it was before one of the Australia/Ireland International Rules tests) but I remember he came on playing some old guy and referring to himself as "Spokesperson of the Arena". Maybe it the phrase that struck me as comical (it still does oddly enough) or the fact that four years of "Spokesperson" would have been far more entertaining than the wankfest he produced every week but it entertained me greatly. I even lifted my generous offer of a thousand dollars for the first person to hit him live on camera for a week. Sadly next time we saw him it was back to normal and the fatwa was redeclared.

Things really got disturbing during 1998 when the shadowy people who run the MCG decided that they needed a theme song to compete with that Greg Champion song that was all over Channel 7's coverage at the time. Thus Voice of the G's sole contribution to Australian rock "Nothing Beats the Footy at the MCG" was born. And by christ did they plug it a lot - you got the full thing twice before the game, once at quarter time, twice during the half-time break, once at three-quarter time and as many times as they could after the siren before everyone was removed from the stadium. We stayed behind after a game against Fremantle (Melbourne by 23 points) to have a punt on the hallowed turf and we conservately estimate that they played it 15 times before they threw us all out.

I've never met anyone ever who bought a copy. I seriously don't think anybody ever did, and that's probably why he ended up getting the sack. After three years they probably realised his "Don't worry, keep pressing copies, it'll break into the charts any day now" prediction wasn't going to come true.

Presumably he's back on the dole, or the theatre restaurant circuit, now but he'd be proud knowing that the other day I was sitting around doing something and suddenly thought "You know, Nothing Beats the Footy at the MCG wasn't such a bad song after all." What's that they say about artists never being fully appreciated until they're dead?

I love the way MSN Messenger tries to blame your internet connection when it can't sign you in and everything else net related is working fine. It's just so Microsoft to say it's your fault when one of their products isn't working. God knows there's enough NineMSN advertising plastered into the freaking program that they should at least manage to avoid disconnecting you every twenty seconds. It's still better than ICQ though.

And while I was searching their website for explanation about the latest service outage I saw an ad for "MSN Personals". I pity the fool who puts their love life in the hands of Microsoft, you'd probably end up going a date with a filing cabinet.

I'd like to think that the shithouse amount of hits I've been getting over the past week have more to do with the fact that Blogger is down for at least six hours every day than any other reason. It might also have something to do with the fact that despite republishing my archives five times they're still not working. It's tempting to follow the crowd and jump ship to Moveable Type, but what would I bitch about then?

Anyway, for those of you tuning in during the rare moments of full-scale TSP operations, let's continue on.

As mentioned earlier I subjected myself to the horrors of the Docklands Monstrosity Stadium yesterday afternoon to see Melbourne's win over Footscray. As far as the game goes I was pleased with the way we played, a bit disappointed that the game wasn't put away more convincingly in the last quarter when we had a massive height advantage up forward and absolutely bewildered by some of the worst umpiring in the history of the game.

You tend to cop the odd suspicious decision when your team has won by six goals but some of the rubbish being dealt out today was almost criminal in it's scale. Clint Bizzell took a mark, ran about five metres playing on, got nailed by a perfect tackle by one of the Bulldogs defenders and somehow earnt a free-kick. I almost felt guilty seeing him slot the resulting kick through for a goal. Then there was the fact that if David Neitz had been paid half the free-kicks that Luke Darcy gave away in ruck contests inside the forward 50 he would have kicked 15, not seven. That the mysterious decisions were dealt evenly between the two sides may have been the umpires only saving grace.

I've covered my hatred for Coronial Stadium before (good luck getting that link to work without the aid of voodoo) so there's no need to go into it again except to say that anybody who expects me to praise the idea of having sat inside while Melbourne experienced the mother of all rainstorms today is in for a surprise. I'd still rather sit in the pissing rain at the MCG (even without the Ponsford Stand) for four quarters than one perfectly dry one at the Corporate Hell Hole. I was heartened to hear on the radio today that plenty of Medallion Club members will be voting with their feet and not renewing at the end of this season. I'm sick to death of the AFL and their assorted goons trying to ram down our throat what a great place it is. It's crap. Waverley was a dive in the middle of nowhere but at least it had character.

I do, against better judgement, find myself agreeing with St. Kilda President the improbably named Rod Butterss when he says that we need a 25,000 seat ground somewhere in Melbourne for those clubs without a massive bandwagon supporter base to play profitably at. The future of Footscray, North, Melbourne and god-forbid even St. Kilda is at stake as long as they are continually forced (and in some cases even choose for some reason) to play at Docklands.

I'll be taking the trip down to Geelong next Saturday to hopefully see us bury the Kardinia Park curse once and for all. Must get to as many games as possible while I'm not rostered to work on weekends, listening to the Essendon debacle last week whilst trying to make it look like I was working was far too difficult.

PS: I humbly withdraw my claims that Richmond will finish last and Freo will make the 8 this year.

A tribute site to the seriously deluded Iraqi Information minister? It had to happen.

Sample content?

"The authority of the civil defense ... issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps," he said, adding that the British and American forces were "immoral mercenaries" and "war criminals" for such behavior.
"I am not talking about the American people and the British people," he said. "I am talking about those mercenaries. ... They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children."

It's like the Baath Party's greatest hits.

"We made them drink poison last night and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly."

Hero! Me MUST have his own TV talk show once the war is over.

I was reading something in a magazine about graffiti today and I remembered my two favourite pieces of vandalism in all of Melbourne.

1) Where we used to play soccer in high school somebody wrote the cryptic message "Toy your mum is wak shit fat bitch" on a wall. None of us white-boy, easties ever really understood what it meant but it was requisite pre-match viewing anyway.
2) The words "Tubby Taylor" painted in six-foot-high spraypaint on a wall in Brunswick. That's still there thankfully.

There's also a very attractive portrait of Homer Simpson on the wall of Burnley station.

Water restrictions be damned! It (to use the correct meteorological term) absolutely pissed down in Melbourne today. Non-stop from the middle of the night to early afternoon in fact. Sadly this always leads to thousands of people saying "Ahh well at least it's good for the Farmers". Congratulations sir, here's your degree in stating the bloody obvious - cliches and truisms division.

Of course then you get the farmers who get floods when this kind of bucketing rain comes around. I'm sure they'd like to jab each and every person who decided the downpour was good for them in the arse with a pitchfork.

Or something.

I don't know what I've done to achieve such status in the world but the spam I get everyday has somehow elevated into a higher socio-economic bracket. Amongst the viruses, Nigerian scams, porn-ads and christian music CD ads I get everyday I'm suddenly getting tons of email telling me about the worldwide price of works of art. I'm not sure exactly who they're expecting to go "Oh, I never thought of paying $200,000 for a Picasso before but now I just might" but it's nice to be included.

I repeat my pre-war comment - Would you rather live in a country run by Islamic psychopaths or Christian psychopaths?

Creationists, pro-lifers and conservatives now pose a serious threat to research and science teaching in the US

Some of the stuff in this article is seriously sick. See for instance

Or maybe you were an Aids activist, elated by the president's unexpected (and genuinely revolutionary) announcement in the State of the Union address of $15bn (£9.7bn) in funding for fighting the epidemic worldwide - and then surprised to find that only around 10% was destined for the Global Aids Fund, while the rest would be funnelled through US agencies, where it is more likely to be accessible to American abstinence-only groups campaigning against condoms.

Then there's,

John Marburger, Bush's new science advisor, was informed that the role would no longer be a cabinet position. The White House had decided that "they don't need that level of scientific input," Allan Bromley, the first President Bush's science advisor, said glumly at the time.

These people really are evil. You can take your great war victory and cram it with walnuts, because Bush MUST go at the next election. Let's all gather together and pray (as the Republican Party would obviously want us to) that the Democrats nominate somebody decent.

Although it might seem that my interest in English football now starts and ends at the Seagrave Haulage Combined Counties League nothing could be further from the truth.

Even before I started supporting Wimbledon (RIP) I was more interested in following the divisions below than the Premiership (or 1st Division as it was known then). At one point, before I succumbed to the bandwagon mentality of following a top division team, I considered myself a Cambridge United fan. Why? Absolutely no idea. I still look out for their results now.

In the dark days between the the murder of Wimbledon Football Club and the formation of AFC Wimbledon I submitted to the most scientific method of choosing a new team known to man. The random draw from a hat. The principle has always been the same (although I think we've only ever done it twice) - you put the names of all the teams across the divisions that you'd accept supporting then you draw out four (just to draw out the tension a bit) and then the fifth is the team you're betrothed to for the rest of time. My selection, done in the bar of the Box Hill Indoor Sports Center during the half-time break of one of the World Cup games last year threw together luminaries across all four divisions (and a couple of conference teams too). It could have been anyone from Everton to Stoke City or Rushden and Diamonds. In the end it turned out to be Crystal Palace, who were coincidentally the closest thing Wimbledon ever had to a blood rival. I checked out a few of their websites in the next few days, fulling intending to live the prophecy of the hat but my heart just wasn't in it. Of course my support for Palace was conditional on the Milton Keynes move being rejected or a new Wimbledon club formed, so when AFC Wimbledon came to being it saved me from a lifetime as a Palace fan.

The hat currently has a 50% strike rate. I might have been unable to get into the team I selected, even if AFC had never been born, but my friend Amul has parlayed his seemingly random selection of Southampton into an support so hardcore that I feel almost duty-bound to name him as the Saints biggest fan in this country.*

I'm interested in the fates of teams that 99% of the people who profess to be 'soccer' fans in this country have never heard of. Usually I read the Division 3 and Conference results before even considering a glance at the fates of your Arsenal or Liverpool. Here's a new spectator sport for you. Go out into the streets and bail the first person wearing a Manchester United (spit) shirt up with a map of Europe and ask them to positively identify where Manchester is. You'll laugh as they point to London! You'll cry as they quizzically look towards Scotland! You'll hang yourself when they finally choose Belgium!

What little interest I do have in the Premier League usually rotates around wishing for 'big' clubs to somehow conspire to get themselves relegated. You have no idea how much I wanted to see Leeds go down this year. They did their best by hiring the totally useless shonky businessman Terry Venables but sadly decided to give him the arse when they got a little too close to the drop zone for comfort. Think about how many Leeds replica shirts ($12 from the Victoria Market) would have gone into long-term storage if they'd been relegated? Imagine tens of thousands of people suddenly wondering who they should support instead? I'm sure there would be some people who'd stay loyal no matter how far the team sank, but they'd be an overwhelming minority.

Take Manchester City for example. I wouldn't go so far as saying they were "all the rage" in the early 90's but they did have a fair share of support. Where, then, did all the shirts and support go as they plummeted out of the Premiership on the last day of the 1995/96 season? Of course, the comically story about that day is that City took their foot off the pedal with ten minutes left in their game against Liverpool thinking results were favourable to send either Coventry or Southampton down instead. It was only when Niall Quinn, who had been subbed off, ran back out of the sheds waving a walkman and bringing the news that they were in the bottom three did they realise that they needed a goal to stay up. Shambolic.

But I digress. City's support base in this country slowly ebbed away as they struggled to a mid-table finish in the First Division the next year. When a roundly unsuccesful 98/99 season saw them relegated to the Second Division (3rd Division in the old language) you would have been lucky to get Les Murray to mention them, let alone a fickle Melbournian. That year they pulled off one of the great miracles of all-time to pull back a 2 goal deficit in injury time and beat Gillingham on penalties. The next year they were promoted back to the top flight - suddenly they were a club of choice for the masses again. They were relegated again in their first year back, City-mania had to take a break for another year. Happily enough they did the job and won their way back into the Premiership for this season - 2000/2001 edition replica shirts back on.

I've got nothing against Manchester City. In fact as blood rivals of United I've almost got an affinity for them. It's just a good example of what happens when a supposedly 'big' club is relegated. Where were the City shirts when they were losing mid-week Division Two games to Macclesfield a few years back? I didn't see any, and I suspect that's exactly what have happened with Leeds. Shame we're not going to see it happen now.

I often wonder what these fair-weather fans think when teams they've never heard of like West Bromwich Albion, Barnsley, Bradford (and come next season Portsmouth and/or Reading) suddenly appear on the Premier League fixtures at the start of the season. They must know that there's at least one division below the 'big' boys, but the Premier League highlights show never mentions it and it never gets a mention in the paper so what do they care?

* If you need to find a side to follow TSP is proud to announce that we can now provide remote random draws for you. Write in here if you're a poor lost soul who needs help to find the right team for you.

Bizarre spam of the day.

It started like this,

You are receiving this email because you opted-in to receive special offers from Lucky Prize through one of our online affiliates.

Bullshit. But moving on I allegedly signed up for something called "lucky prize" - so what kind of "lucky" products were they trying to flog to me? Penis extensions? No. Photos of Jennifer Lopez with a horse? No. What I did get was,

Warning! Are you prepared for a natural disaster?

Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Floods, Wildfires, Ice Storms and now, Terrorism.

These days, it doesn’t matter where you live. Everyone is at risk for one or more of these types of disasters. Global Warming and Political instability in other parts of the world have created an environment where no one is truly safe. And yet most of us go about our lives with the attitude that "it won’t happen to me." The truth is that we have never been more at risk.

If that's the 'lucky' prize then I'll be running a mile when I get an email offering me the 'unlucky' one.

Well, against all odds I actually rounded somebody else up and used my free tickets to the Melbourne Santana concert tonight. It pretty much all went over my head, but the punters seemed to love it and they actually payed their $98.50 (!) so I guess that's all that counts.

My knowledge of Latino music extends merely to some song by Gloria Estefan and that Barcelona Olympic theme so I might have been missing the point but by the halfway mark I'd have enough guitar solos to last a lifetime. Then they decided to debut the 20 minute drum solo. Yes, that's 20 minutes. A third of an hour in my life that'll I'll never get back. Sure, I appreciate the impressive amount of endurance it took to perform but that didn't detract from the fact that it was horrifically boring. Even the "we'll cheer anything" yobbos next to me calmed down for a second about 12 minutes in.

The most amusing part of my night was discovering just how much Carlos himself looked like our old friend Saddam Hussein. I waited the whole night for the US 5th Marine Division to pour out of the audience and launch a decapitation attack on the rhythm section (and probably kill several innocent bystanders and half their own squadron at the same time) but alas it was not to be.

He also started spouting random catchphrases at various points during the evening. Some madness about love and being a positive virus to spread the message about peace to the rest of the world. Admirable sentiments, and the crowd ate it up, but it made him sound completely and utterly barking to tell the truth.

Oh, and I passively smoked enough Ganja to ensure that i'll never pass a drug test again in my life. Thanks ageing hippies!

Either Fox News are branching into comedy or this is a highly clever attempt at April Fools Day hilarity.

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox's headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn't carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

"War protester auditions here today ... thanks for coming!" read one message. "Who won your right to show up here today?" another questioned. "Protesters or soldiers?"

Said a third: "How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them."

Still another read: "Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street" - a reference to the film maker who denounced the war while accepting an Oscar on Sunday night for his documentary "Bowling for Columbine."

Mind you, the less said about Fox's headquarters being "rimmed" by a news ticker the better. Those crazy Americans.

Well, it's footy time again. And when Melbourne aren't on a Friday night that means sitting down and enjoying the genius of Gary Lyon and Dennis Cometti ("Well, the ball certainly has a sense of humour) on Channel 9. Of course there's also the irritating Dermott Brereton to contend with but he's not as bad as he used to be. Eddie's on as well of course, and he's proven himself to be one of the better callers of recent times so I'll take him a balance to the colossal bullshit Dermie speaks.

Anyway, for about the last four seasons we've had this anti-drink driving ad on in Melbourne (interstate viewers may have localised versions featuring crap sports like Rugby Union) whenever Richmond play. It's basically just two pissheads having drunken conversations and being stopped from driving their car by a tiger roaring when they attempt to open the door. So far so completely banal? Well there's a bit in it that I don't get. Just as they're leaving the MCG one pisspot says to the other,

"Play the theme song to dreamer because you didn't kick the winning goal in '98 my friend"

All these years and I've never been able to work out what in gods name he's talking about. A movie perhaps? I think they deliberately wrote a script that made no sense at all so people would look at it and go "Sweet jesus, I'm never drinking again if I speak that kind of crap".

The only thing I remember about Richmond's '98 season is when they needed to beat us in the last round to secure a rare finals spot but went home 76 point losers (Neitz and Jeff Farmer 5 each for the winners). That game was also notable for Farmer's screamer which was RIPPED OFF from winning Mark-of-the-Year because Bruce McAvaney wanted to have Winston Abraham's children (Bruce: "Ohhhh Winnie! Silky skills! Isn't he gifted?" Australia: "Fuck off"). The bogans should have talked about that game instead. I saw grown men cry because they didn't finish 8th and earn the right to get pounded in the first week of the finals. That would make a much better ad than the highly unrealistic scenario of a potential drink-driver being convinced not to drive at high speed through pedestrians on Brunton Avenue (which is closed after each match at the discretion of the Police Operational Commander as the MCG scoreboard delights in telling you every week) by the king of the jungle.

So, if anyone knows what in the name of jebus that ad is referring to then please send answers on the back of Danny Frawley's resignation letter to the usual address because it's really been concerning me recently.