There’ll be some added interactive shit for all you kids! As well as techno babble from me, stories from Randolph (when ever he gets an internet connection) and about 50 tales of the now infamous Snappy!

Stay tuned?

Here’s a quick rundown on my gripes from the last game and how they look in 09…

Blocks and rebounds: Blocking is a lot more realistic now, you are rewarded for playing good defense but only in context of what’s happening all around you. No ridiculous volleyball-style spikes anymore and the blocked player’s body get’s shifted around depending on the block. Pretty nice.  Rebounding is improved too. Watching the replays shows only players in position get the rebound and all the elastic warping of the ball into the players hands is totally gone. In fact ball physics is really well done this time round.

Layups/Dunks: Layups are now much more varied and contextual, as are the dunks. After playing the demo for a few hours I only saw the same dunk a few times. Players dunk left handed going left and right handed going right, no 360’s from a standing start or through 4 defenders, and the interaction with the hoop (ball physics again) is a lot more realistic. Layups are much more contextual as well, with player only double-clutching or reversing when it suits what the defense has given them.

Steals: I complained about no freestyle steals in 08 (left and right on the thumbstick) but haven’t noticed this at all in this game. Maybe I got used to using the button? Anyway I find myself gambling for steals less and staying in front of guys more.

I may or may not do a full write up when the game actually drop. I am a lazy lazy man.

The questions below are just a sample of the ridiculous questions I copied down verbatim from a test I was forced to undertake at a specialist agency in Melbourne as part of the recruitment process for a position as an Oil Man at an Oil company.  After being mesmerised by Daniel Day Lewis’ performance in There Will Be Blood, all of a sudden I too wanted to be an Oil Man, although I don’t think that was the films purpose.  This particular test took over 6 hours on a Saturday and I’m guessing that the test was slightly tailored for the role of Oil Man.  At many instances, whilst confronted with difficult questions, I found myself putting me feet in Daniel Day Lewis’ shoes in order to ascertain what a good Oil Man would do (WWDDLD? – What Would Daniel Day Lewis Do?).

At the beginning of the test you’re told that when answering questions you should pick the first answer that comes into your head.  But this is a LIE.  You have to lie a lot if you want to do well in these tests. You also have to have super amazing vision to be able spot the differences in the pattern analysis section.  But I won’t talk about that section here, just take my word for it, it’s hard and you should take a magnifying glass.

YES or NO questions

One of the worst things about this section is that it’s not timed so you can ponder and theorise the meanings of each question all day if your hunger doesn’t get to you first or you strangle yourself with the mouse cable.

[Note: where you see “speech marks”, they were in the test question too.  I.e. they weren’t added by me for emphasis.]

#296 – Have you several times had to “sit on” rude or annoying people?

I’ve never heard the expression “sit on” in conjunction with shutting someone up. Have I figuratively sat on someone by shutting them up by something I said?  Or have I had to do it, or maybe should have done it, but I didn’t actually do it? The speech marks also confused me here.  Did I literally sit on someone? I’m sure I have sat on my brother once, but have I done it several times?  How am I supposed to remember how many times I sat on my brother – that was like 20 years ago?  Now I’m over thinking everything and I’ve got another 600 of these questions.

#298 – Have you ever had anyone slip something over you so cleverly that it tricked you?

The words “slip” and “over you” somehow make you think about physical things, like someone putting a bag over your head.  But if you take away the physical aspect of the question, and give “slip” a figurative meaning, then it reads “Have you ever been tricked so good that it tricked you?”  And that just doesn’t make one bit of sense?  That’s the questions trick.  After having already undergone four hours of testing by this stage (already done the maths and pattern analysis sections), I just could not figure out the meaning of this one so I walked up to the reception desk and asked the lady who was facilitating the test what it meant.  She told me that “slip” meant “trick”.  When I explained to her the conundrum I had with that interpretation she said “I know, but that’s how the psychologists meant it, it’s not a mistake”. Ok, so this question is actually designed to make you go mental I thought.  “So you’re saying that an educated person who speaks English actually wrote this test?” I asked.  Then I’m pretty sure she put her hand under the desk and pressed a secret emergency button.

#144 – When things are going smoothly are you inclined to let well enough alone rather than to seek improved methods?

“Let well enough alone”? What does that mean?  I had to read that sentence 10 times just to convince myself that it actually existed and that I wasn’t actually in one of those distorted Grand Theft Auto IV dreams I’d been having.  This was the first moment in the test where I had a ‘(GASP) I’ve never seen those words together before, what’s my first language again?’ moment.

#159 – …let them severely alone…  [Something about having to leave someone severely alone cause they were such a pain in the A-hole or something]

The first four words were all I managed to scribble down for this question.  But I was getting really hungry and delirious by this point.  I think that the ability to handle hunger and delirium were actually two important attributes that this Oil Man test was also evaluating.  Sometimes oil prospectors have to go without food and go crazy.  But seriously, how does anyone ‘let’ anything ‘severely’ ‘alone’?? Those words should be left severely apart.

#161 – Do you ever blush?

You must answer YES for this one.  Everyone has blushed at least once in their life and if you’re dumb enough to lie on this question then they will probably just release the dogs on the spot.

#166 – Have you ever had anyone take you in so cleverly that you had to admit it was one on you?

First of all, I’ve never ever heard anyone, let alone myself, say the precise words “I admit it, that was one on me.”  I’m not sure what century those words come from.  Secondly, there’s a pattern forming here about whether you get fooled easily.  I can’t think of any other job where this attribute is really important except in the Oil prospecting business, which seems to be full of false prophets and liars.  For this very reason this Oil employer must have told the testing agency that to be an Oil Man you can’t be someone who gets tricked easily.  In There Will Be Blood Daniel, Day Lewis’ character doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who gets tricked very easily.  Especially when he’s prospecting for oil.  And he’s the model of a successful Oil Man.  So if you want to be an Oil Man you have to say NO on this one.

#222 – Is more than one person afraid of you?

Despite being in a room full of other serious Oil Man hopefulI, I actually had to LOL unrelentlessly at this one.

At first I thought that it would be better to say NO here.  Surely they won’t want to employ people that they might potentially be afraid of in the future?  But then I remembered ol true blue Oil Man Daniel Day Lewis and how he destroyed that dirty false prophet Eliah in that 10 pin bowling match.  Surely people are afraid of that Oil Man.  Eliah the quarter wit sure as hell should have been if he had any sense.  I’ll never go bowling with Daniel D after watching that scene.  SO maybe I should say YES? Hhhhhmmmmm.

#? – Have you ever been in a fist fight?

This one’s particularly hard as it doesn’t have a time frame of the alleged fist fights occurrence, so they’ll just assume it happened last week and you currently have anger problems.  Nor does it give you an opportunity to explain yourself by giving an excuse for the fist fight, eg “she was a homeless” or something to make the fight appear more reasonable because of the context.

#196 – When you were a child, did you belong to a crowd or gang that tried to stick together through thick and thin?

At first this sentence sounds innocent.  But then you read it again and it will make your head explode.  It probably claimed about 10 minutes of my life to answer this one.  At first I thought ‘yeah I had some close buddies at school, sure I’ll say YES, otherwise they’ll think I don’t have good people or teamwork skills.’  But then you think, ‘hold on a second, did that question contain the words ‘gang’ and ‘through thick and thin’ in it?  I’m sure I was in gangs of friends at primary school but there was no organised crime involved.  We didn’t have any criminal underworld connections.  And what does ‘through thick and thin’ mean?  Did any of us go to jail to avoid snitching on our friends? None of this sentence is sounding so innocent anymore.

On reflection, I think the correct answer here, at least if your applying for an Oil Man position, is ‘NO.”  On balance, surely the trait of not being in a gang was more important than being a social reject to this employer.  And there were also no gangs in There Will Be Blood except maybe for the church folk.

#? Have you ever felt useless – almost no good at all?

Unless you have decided at this point in the test that you don’t actually want to be an Oil Man anymore, you must say NO, no matter how useless you are.

#25 – We’re you nearly always “on the go” as a child?

In hindsight I think that I was possibly over thinking everything at this stage.  To me this question asked whether you suffered from ADHD.  The speech marks also made me consider whether maybe “on the go” was an Australian euphemism for ‘taking drugs’ that I didn’t know about.

#? – Are there several important questions upon which you have not as yet declared yourself, although most of your friends have done so?

What a truly searching question.  “Are you gay?”  That’s the only question that I could come up with that fits into this scenario.

#? – Have your activities ever been interrupted by “blank” periods?

Damn those speech marks to an eternity of Oil Hell. They are automatic five minute wasters.

STRONGLY AGREE/AGREE/NEUTRAL/DISAGREE/STRONGLY DISAGREE questions

These questions are statements, often phrased in a double negative fashion, and you have to pick one of the above answers.

#? – I have never literally jumped for joy.

How can they use the word literally in a question like this, especially whilst posing the question in the negative, with those options to answer with?  I think I may have jumped for joy before but am I sure that I literally did it?  And do I strongly disagree that I didn’t do it?  My eyes are bleeding.

I wish I had written down more of these ones but I was gasping for real oxygen and hungry and I didn’t think I wanted to be an Oil Man anymore.  The worst thing about them is that they would make a negative statement, but then, in order to make sense of it in a way that would enable you to decide whether you strongly agreed/disagreed etc, you had to convert it to a positive statement and this was just a tiring process.

AND MORE

On top of these nonsensical questions, there were also stacks of repeated questions on the following themes:

-Have you ever had a sick day?
-Do you ever get headaches/have you ever had a headache/are you subject to headaches?
-Have you ever gambled? Do you like gambling? Are you a gambler? Do you like watching boxing, horse racing or wrestling on TV? [how on earth did wrestling get in this list? Do people actually bet on wrestling? If I say that I watched some wrestling will they think I’m a gambler or will they just think I’m a idiot? DO they maybe just want a friend to go to the casino with?]
-Do you sleep good? Do you fall asleep instantly? [there must have been about 10 questions on the sleep theme].
-Are you a socialist?
-Have you had periodic vomiting?
-Are you a crook? Have you ever stolen anything? [so many along these lines]

Some of the crazy crasian styz I saw in Siam Square on my recent trip to Bangkok.  You have to read the caption at the bottom of the I Love Milk t-shirt, priceless.  Bottom right photo has me wearing some stupid glasses and a T-shirt that has the caption “Dog Sick?” with some Thai writing beneath it (presumably “Dog Sick” in Thai, but who knows).   Dog Sick?  That questions mark kills me! How did that make it to a T-shirt…

Anyway, a LOT going on right now but my main goal this week is to get this blog design updated. I’ve narrow down to 2 or 3 possible formats which will then require some re-designing. Bear with us if everything looks a bit kooky if you visit this week.

Once the redesign is done we’ll be rolling into a big steaming load of catching up!

Lem.

The great thing about the room is that people are constantly wanting to join you in there and if you have a good crew you can be selective about who you allow to enter. LOC wasn’t quite big enough to be selective about the applicants so we let in the first people who came along. Whilst shooting the bull with our new friends the following happens:

-Lemon leaves for the bar and comes back looking all distraught. Apparently he has practically been molestered at the bar by some crazed female who has just earlier been disallowed entry into a winery (it’s now only about 7pm).

-30 minutes later, after a few Bimbo $4 pizzas, Lemon exits agian, for a waz this time, and this blonde broad runs into the room, Benson cries “Willow!” and Willow throws herself at Benson and I’m thinking wow it’s a small world, Benson’s only been in Melbourne for a day and he’s already bumping into people.

-Lemon re-enters room with empty bladder, sees Willow and then she jumps on him too. I’m wondering who is this girl? She knows everyone? Then I realise that Willow and the winery girl are one and the same and she must have also attacked Benson in one of his excursions out of the room too, but on a separate occasion to her attack on Lemon. It’s not safe out there, or in here.

-Next, Willow’s friend, who has the facial appearance of a cute cartoon fieldmouse, enters the room, eyes up my brand new Brixton pimp hat (direct from the US&A), and starts clawing me to get her hands on it. And I’m thinking these girls are wild.

-Mouse runs off with my hat and then Willow jumps on the table in front of us and starts giving an impromptu dance and describes her particular move as “the horseshoe.” She had many variations of the horseshoe, the left horseshoe, the right horseshoe etc. When I asked if she could do the reverse horseshoe - “Of course!” and she happily complied. All the horseshoes looked pretty much the same, but maybe they went in different directions. From where we we’re sitting, practically beneath her, all the horseshoes looked the same.

-Mouse re-enters, luckily still wearing my Brixton hat, grabs Benson’s camera, gets down on her hands and knees and starts taking photos of Willow’s horseshoe. I’m thinking man does this girl takes some liberties.

-Now we realise that Willow really was some sort of entertainer. She stopped dancing and started telling a story which required a lot of animated body actions. At one point her animated story telling got so extreme that she jumped on the seat, lost her balance and fell towards Lemon, thus knocking his glass to the floor, and then she crashes down onto floor covered in broken glass.

-We were all shocked and knelt down to see if she was ok. But Willow wasn’t worried about the possibility of injury. All she was worried about was finishing her story. She picked herself half off the ground, and whilst still on her knees with blood oozing out of her hands and arms, immediately re-started telling the story from where she had left off, that’s how dedicated she was to the stories punch line.

-When Willow had finished we helped her on to her feet and tried to help clean out the shards of Lemon’s glass that were sticking out. However, she wasn’t interested in this, she was more interested in getting into another story. She really was an entertainer extraordinaire. Later she claimed to have spawned from the Camberra, ACT, which she claimed stood for Awesome, Caring and Terrific, brilliant.

-Soon after, LOC had a quick pow wow and decided that we really had to leave if we were going to make our next rendezvous at bar 161 on Chapel Street, plus these girls were too dangerous. Before we could leave I really needed to make sure I get my hat out of the building, but every time I grabbed at it Mouse actually tried to fight me. When I made up a story about how it had sentimental value to me and it was a gift from my mother she told me not to be a tight arse and that it was hers. I’m thinking - flammin galahs, this sheila’s insane.

-So, there the three of us are, standing outside the entrance of the extreme room which happened to have these velvets ropes on metal poles sealing off it’s entrance from one side. It almost looked as if the velvet ropes were sometimes used to control the crowds of people trying to get into the round room. We wanted to leave, but I was still waiting for another visual of mouse so I could grab my hat and run.

-Mouse appeared. I did a fake lunge with my left hand for the hat and she quickly ducked right, but not anticipating my lunges fakeness, or my actual right handedness, ducked straight into my right arms reach. I grabbed the hat, her eyes raged, her claws came out, she snarled and lunged at my eyes. The hat had become a Gollum-ring like obsession to her, it was her preeeeecioous. The hat had become my Indiana Jones hat (it even looks a little like Indy’s hat) and I wasn’t going to leave it in the round room temple of doom.

-Realising it was my only chance of escape, but with people blocking all of my exits, I put the Indy hat on, thus immediately triggering the Indy theme song in my head, I whirled around and stepped back towards the round room, the place where the whole mess began. Unfortunately I didn’t notice the line of velvet ropes blocking my path, they we’re only about crotch height after all, and there were a lot of people around. At the same time as feeling the velvet rope gather round me, I also felt the air whooshing around my neck from the slashing claws of the mouse. In utter desperation I continued my stride thus collecting a string of poles and velvet ropes around my waist.

-The dark round room now seemed to be inhibited entirely by large people and I had to jump over a fat sitting near the entrance, his stomach almost blocking it. Leaving a pile of velvet ropes at my feet I scuttled over the coffee table. I felt her claws digging deep into my back and start to scramble up my neck towards the hat. In the nick of time I was able to grab it off my head.

-As I raised the hat above my head towards the roof, she dived for the ceiling but fell inches short and plummeted to the floor. I could still hear the Indy theme song playing as this happened. Sensing my only chance of escape and seeing Benson and Lemon both stooping over with laughter, I quickly rejoined them outside the room and we all bee lined towards the exit of the bar. As we slipped through the packed dance floor, Amazonian Indians wearing loincloths appeared everywhere and blew poisonous darts at us from pipes held to their mouths.

-After scrambling through the crowd we had to quickly compose ourselves before we walked past the security men at the door, I have witnessed that some of these Bimbo’s bouncers have screws lose and belong in prison. We didn’t want to arouse any suspicion.

-As soon as our feet were finally planted on Brunswick Road we all had a quick glance at each other, then, without talking, we all instantly put our heads down and started sprinting down the sidewalk and away to safety.

So much for a quick pizza.

As well as the important business mentioned above, it was also decided at the 2008 conference that Benson, after completely failing LOC NZ, is to be transferred to LOC Melbourne and that he has to contribute one new “P Wagon convertible” to the cause. Benson now drives the fabulous LOC convertible, but can only now afford to sleep in a swag (an Australian tent).