Latest Posts
-
FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Brazil v Mexico, Russia v S Korea, Australia v The Netherlands
Brazil 0 Mexico 0 I am woken gently by my old man at 5:10am and asked, the way that substitute teachers are apparently asked, if I would like to come in to work today – which is my way of paraphrasing him letting me know that Brazil vs Mexico is on – and I say no, but I somehow find myself on ...
-
FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Germany v Portugal, Iran v Nigeria, USA v Ghana
Germany 4 Portugal 0 I wake at 3:15am and, unlike yesterday, decide to make a fist of watching the rest of the early game between a genuine heavyweight and a perennially flighty but always interesting contender. Boiling hot water and lack of sleep could be a dangerous combination, but I manage to pour the water into my Brian Griffin mug (it was ...
-
FootballWorld Cup Farken: Believing to win with the Yanks
Last Saturday night during the Italy v England match I tweeted. Natal weather update. Gone from raining cats and dogs to raining big Saint Bernards. Now I know what Noah went through. #WorldCup2014 — Athas Zafiris (@ArtSapphire) June 14, 2014 For the punters gathered at the my local churrascaria (steak house) on Ponte Negra Beach, Natal, it resulted in a minor inconvenience. ...
-
FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Côte d’Ivoire v Japan, France v Honduras, Argentina v BiH
Côte d’Ivoire 2 Japan 1 Gary Bloom is commentating this match, and all I can think of is how much this feels like 1994, back when Bloom was the voice of the Serie A show that SBS used to play from 10:30 to 11:30, before On The Ball and then off to Middle Park or Olympic Village, and then home for the replay of ...
-
FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Australia v Chile, Uruguay v Costa Rica, Italy v England
Chile 3 Australia 1 Unlike some other extant South Melbourne fans – a very small minority I assure you – I have no regrets about continuing to support the Socceroos despite the events of the last ten years, even if I have no idea who the hell most of them are any more. As mentioned in a recent post on my personal blog, most ...
-
FootballThe Heavy Sleeper’s World Cup Review: Brazil v Croatia, Spain v Netherlands
Brazil 3 Croatia 1 Unusually toss and turn all night instead of sleeping like a brick, waking up in time to miss most of the anthems, which is a good thing, because most anthems suck anyway, as do opening ceremonies. This Olic bloke is sweating like he’s just destroyed the entire Viet Cong army singlehandedly, and it’s only ten minutes into the ...
-
FootballWorld Cup Farken: Puto!! Celebrating victory with the Mexicans
The cancelled flight from Lisbon to Recife. The look on your face when you realise you will miss your connection to Natal. That sinking feeling when you depart the airport for a nearby hotel on a courtesy bus and not for Brazil on an airplane. The frantic calls trying to organise another flight to Natal. Down below, the English on their way ...
-
FootballThe Spirit of 74
A rag-tag bunch of semi-professionals led by a street-wise war orphan arrived in West Germany 40 years ago to take on the football world’s elite. And so was born the legend of the Socceroos. “Why have we got these kangaroos at the World Cup? How have we ended up with this bunch of no-hopers at the world’s greatest tournament?” – Bild-Zeitung newspaper, ...
-
Pop Culture 2EuroFarken: 10 Artists Shoot Farken would like to see at Eurovision 2014
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m as big a fan of the annual Eurovision Song Contest as any kitsch-loving hipster doofus around. I get the attraction of the overblown ballads, the scantily dressed Euro babes, the dodgy interpretations of folk traditions and the interminable vote count filled with the usual neighbourly back-scratching. I get all that and love it too. But now ...
-
Pop CultureHow I discovered the wonder of Eurovision: A Story of Love and Loss
It seems that everywhere I go people are getting excited about the new season of The Voice. There is vigorous debate about many facets of the show. Will Kylie Minogue’s seated grooving be as mesmerising as Delta Goodrem’s ostentatious “dancing”? Does Ricky Martin’s sculpted facial hair make him more or less sexy? Does Will.i.am actually understand the rules of punctuation and will ...
-
FootballThe Short Sad History of Shit Socceroos World Cup Songs
After 32 years of hurt, Australian football fans have been blessed with three successive appearances in the World Cup. This most welcome blessing has also been accompanied by a curse – shit Socceroos World Cup songs. Why does the FFA (Football Federation Australia) keep flogging this dead musical horse by persisting to put out lame arse “Official” Socceroos World Cup Songs? The ...
-
Australian RulesSupport Shoot Farken, Buy a Shoot Farken T-shirt
A new design has entered the T-shirt Hall of Fame, joining iconic T-shirts designs like the “Austin 3:16”, “Choose Life” and “Vote for Pedro”. The new Shoot Farken T-shirt has the stark classicism of Black Flag’s “four bars” design, the radical chic of the “Che Guevara” tee and a whiff of that “Happy Birthday Fucker” Faith No More T-shirt that girl you ...
-
Football 3Soccer and Anzac: Forgetting and Remembering in Western Sydney
Soccer has trouble remembering itself. This failing leaves it open to accusations of foreignness and unbelonging, accusations levelled from without and often complacently accepted from within. One of the more curious moments of amnesia in the game is its failure to acknowledge the soccer Anzacs – the soccer players who fought in both World Wars. The Caledonians in Perth, for example, lost ...
-
Pop CultureThe Cinema of Dystopia: “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)”
A few weeks ago I watched Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach for the first time. It’s been on my mind constantly since. I read the book by Nevil Shute, on which the film is based, soon after leaving school. At the time I was deeply involved in the anti-uranium and peace movements and, not surprisingly, its message about the danger of ...
-
Pop CultureRecord Store Day: An Ode to a Racist, Old Drunk, Record Store Owner
He liked Hank Snow, smelt of cigarettes and sherry, and had a souvenir Minutemen licence plate on the wall. His shop, Russell’s Golden Records, was in a pokey block of offices and shoe repair places that no matter the time of year or weather always seemed shrouded in an eternally dank Tuesday 3pm gloom. He sold records. He might even have sold ...
-
Football 6Never Mind The Football: Punk’s World Cup Eleven
THE PREAMBLE I am a simple man. I like my steak bloody, my wife in various forms of undress and my beer alcoholic. With the big “40” bearing down on me like some sort of hellbound death train, the things in life that I actually really need have rapidly condensed down to a bare-knuckled, five-point list of bugger all. These days, consistency ...
-
FootballMelbourne Heart (City) to launch Red & White Buy-Back Scheme
In a Shoot Farken exclusive, we can reveal that Manchester City, the new mega-rich owners of A-League club Melbourne Heart, will soon be launching The Red & White Bye-Bye Heart Buy-Back Scheme. According to documents leaked to Shoot Farken, the plan has been partly inspired by the Australian Government’s recently aborted scheme to buy back old boats from Indonesian fishing villages to ...
-
Pop CultureKesha and the Big, Bad Eyeball of Freedom
Ke$ha recently went into rehab for an eating disorder and came out as Kesha. Notice the difference? Yes, she’s dropped the dollar sign. She’s no longer part of the dollar holla bill rappers club that includes the likes of Ma$e, Curren$y and Joey Bada$$. Of course, there’s also Top Dollar from Endless Boogie, but he doesn’t have an S in his name, so what are you going to do? And ...
-
Pop Culture5 Reasons why Scott “Rock Action” Asheton and The Stooges made this pimply teen’s life better
When I was a kid, my parents – at their wits’ end – were suitably frustrated enough to attempt to alleviate my school holiday boredom by taking me to Ashton’s Circus. It was lame. Underfed, over-disciplined so-called kings of the jungle parading around and around the same cramped dustbowl for seemingly hours on end. Overpriced fairy floss that I wasn’t allowed to ...
-
Pop CultureIndie Comics: Maybe the Nerds are onto something after all
Hollywood’s raging hard-on for comic book adaptations – largely of the ‘tights and fights’ variety – shows no signs of deflating. Increasingly, movies and TV series based on comic books loom as a ‘safe bet’ to an industry short on original ideas; however, many comic book creators are doing anything but playing it safe within their own realm of storytelling. Independent comic ...
-
FootballEverything you wanted to know about winning the World Cup* (*But were afraid to ask)
If Sepp Blatter was a maths-y kind of bloke, there might come a time when he glances at the 5kg lump of gold shaped into the World Cup trophy sitting on his desk, then across to the available 32 days in the calendar for 32 nations to contest the 2014 finals, and wonder aloud, “How in the name of sweet Jules Rimet ...
-
Australian RulesThe Indispensable Football (as in Soccer) Fan’s Guide To AFL 2014
Are you a football fan who is interested in following an AFL team this season? Even outgoing AFL capo dei capi Andrew Demetriou once admitted that it was okay to follow a team in another football code. “And we know that there will be those who switch their colours from the Giants to the Rabbitohs and from the Rabbitohs to the Waratahs, ...
-
Pop CultureUkulele Dreams: Tiny Tim, Vance Joy and the Sound of Hawaii
He walked onto the set of a national TV show looking like a man who would be derelict were his mother to die. Watching Tiny Tim perform his best-known song, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”, on The Johnny Carson Show in 1968 is weird even now, some 46 years later. Forty-six years later. That’s almost half a century. But then Tiny Tim is ...
-
Football
AngeLeaks: Inside the mind of Ange Postecoglou at the Julian Assange Cup
A stream-of-consciousness mind dump from Ange Postecoglou, Socceroos coach, during Australia’s 4-3 loss against Ecuador in a friendly played at The New Den, London. (This readout has been achieved using NSA intercepts & experimental mind meld technologies yet to be fully scientifically tested. Results may not accurately reflect the actual thoughts of the subject.) Yeah-nah…one training session, they expect me to perform ...
-
Pop CultureHombre of the Damned: Meet Padre Iron Maiden, Brazil’s Thorn in the Flesh
I want you to close your eyes for a moment – but keep reading – and picture if you can the stereotypical, clichéd image of a slightly ageing rocker, attempting in vain to deal with the fact he is now past his beastly, shirtless prime. A middle-aged dinosaur if you will. His diminishing thick and lustrous black coif, once a youthful, beaconing ...
-
Football 1Fumbling the Moneyball in the search for England’s Number One
It’s possible that I have a kind of childhood-goalkeeping-related risk-aversion OCD. I email myself at 2am so I don’t forget things I need to do in the morning, count the number of cars at traffic lights, and look behind me for attackers creeping up on the back post. I’m also a broad-spectrum sports head and an intermittent maths nerd, so I compose ...
-
FootballSnap, Kaká, Pop: Jack Lang’s Brazilian Football Adventure
It’s a big year for football and for Brazil, with the World Cup being held in the country that many view as the spiritual home of football. Of course, plenty of Socceroos fans will be making the pilgrimage to the land of Pelé, Christ the Redeemer and the Girl from Ipanema. One of the best sources of information about Brazil’s vast and ...
-
Football 4The A-League is leaving MLS for dead when it comes to TV ratings
I intended to write this piece later in the year. I really did. But all it took was one tweet from a notorious A-League killjoy to change that. I am all for robust discussion about matters affecting the A-League, be they on the pitch or off the pitch, and the advent of social media has seen everyone with a brain, or even ...
-
FootballHow I Learned to Love the Offside Trap
I was schooled in the beauty of a well-sprung offside trap from an early age. My childhood memories are scant, but those that seemed to have left a lasting impression mostly involve football. My family moved from the well-to-do Melbourne suburb of South Yarra to the less-well-to-do bayside suburb of Seaford when I was about five years old, just in time for ...
-
Football 1Remembering Johnny Warren: A Football Pilgrimage to Jamberoo
On the eve of the 17th Johnny Warren Memorial Cup, Shoot Farken brings you a piece by Mark Gojszyk on his pilgrimage to the Jamberoo Pub and his encounter with the Warren family as they reflect on Johnny Warren and his legacy. A short drive south of Wollongong is Jamberoo, a town adorned in history and refusing to cooperate with time. Here, the ...
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- Next Page »
