I’ve reproduced some nice statistics of the Bell litigation (so far) here.

3.2. Statistics

3.2.1. The hearing

Hearing period: 22 July 2003 to 22 September 2006

Hearing days: 404

o Plaintiffs’ opening - 120 days.

o Plaintiffs’ witnesses - 62 days.

o Defendants’ opening - 43 days.

o Defendants’ witnesses - 170 days.

o Post-evidence interlocutory hearings - 4 days.

o Oral closing submissions - 5 days.

3.2.2. The witnesses

Number of witnesses: 166

o Witnesses called and cross-examined - 155.

o Witnesses providing statements (not cross-examined) - 11.

o Lay witnesses - 154.

o Expert witnesses - 12.

3.2.3. The documents

o Documents (pages) imaged for the trial book - 134,706

(452,212).

o Documents (pages) tendered in evidence - 86,340 (318,819).

o Transcript - 37,105 pages.

o Pages (documents) of written closing submissions - 36,932

(770).

3.2.4. Numbers of documents referred to during the hearing

o In the transcript - 14,722.

o In witness statements - 21,347.

o In written closing submissions - 25,471.

3.2.5. The reasons for decision

o Total number of words - 1,084,735.

o Total number of pages - 2,643.

o Pages of analysis and reasoning - 2,511.

o Pages of Schedules - 78.

o Number of paragraphs - 9,762.

o Number of cases cited - 547.

o Animals painted with the name “Bondie” and sacrificed-  12367.

For extra hilarity, Justice Owen also writes:

“For those who are environmentally conscious, a rough calculation indicates that to create one complete set of the tendered documents would use 3.5 tonnes of paper. For that amount of paper, the manufacturing process would require 2.5 pine trees and 200,000 litres of water.”

No doubt, having smashed his head against the wall 1,084,735 times over the space of 5 years, his Honour deserved to write his name into the history books with a spectacularly verbose piece of writing.  I’ve never been a fan of a huge word when there’s a smaller one to do the job, but honestly, when you’re forced to listen to snarky dorks rabbiting on about creditor rights for months on end, you have to do something to entertain yourself.  However, I’d personally prefer sudoku over a “brachyology”.

Egyah!  I think I just wrote a mediocre blog post espousing twee opinions on a topic I don’t really care about! I feel dirty.

With grave apologies,

The Wombat

This is me, fanning my balls like some kind of proboscis monkey.

 Is it hot in here?  It may well be, because my balls are requiring some serious fanning right now.  I am, I must admit, more than a little disillusioned.  The weather is terrible, the work is generally terrible, and the Dutch are making me shit bricks into toilets with viewing platforms.  More on that phenomenon later.  The french buzzard in my office is, as I write, chewing gum in an offensive manner and swearing egregiously under her breath.  I am pleased to be associated with such a friendly, ladylike creature of Francophonic grace.

To something like this:

It really sucked.  However, by the time I arrived in the German industrial hub of Düsseldorf, it was well and truly beer o’clock, and my cousin was already waiting at the pub.

Düsseldorf is certainly a somewhat depressing city to take the train into.  At first glance, it is dirty, smelly, and highly industrial.  There is graffiti everywhere as you approach the station.  The graffiti is not even particularly nice.  I don’t understand why people feel the need to ‘tag’ walls, especially when that wall requires a ladder to reach it.  I’m fine with interesting pieces of artwork, but tagging a wall with a scrawled signature really gets my goat.  Go and endorse your dole cheques if you want to sign something, you rank hippies.  Nobody cares if your tag is ‘original’.  Celine Dion writes ‘original’ music, but it sucks, and so do you.

The city itself is certainly much more pleasant, if a little boring.  However, in my experience, the most boring cities are often the best ones to party in.  After all, if there’s nothing to look at, one might as well drink a beer, or seven.  As a counter-example, consider Sydney.  It is certainly a beautiful place with plenty of terrific things to see and do.  However, I rate going out in Sydney on the same level of enjoyment level as a) cleaning the toilet; b) listening to the first and only Chumbawumba album; and c) fanning my balls like a proboscis monkey.  I’m not looking forward to returning to the city where bouncers at pubs like the Three Wise Monkeys touch your genitalia to check for hidden knives.  I’m not looking forward to returning to crowds of moronic, musclebound dopes and mean, stupid girls drinking mojitos and discussing how great John Howard was for interest rates.

In Düsseldorf, they might well be discussing such things, but I don’t speak German so it doesn’t irritate me.  It is home to the world’s “longest bar”: an enormous pub district and all-round party empire.  Nobody has told the Germans that techno blows goats, so they fumf and farf and singen alongen endlessly, which is actually quite cool.

After numerous tasty beers, I managed to work myself into a mightily spastic state, lose my cousin and spew with reckless abandon, bolstering my resolve to continue drinking with my knowledge of the German beer purity law.  As one esteemed professor has suggested, it is only the preservatives in commercial beer that gives you a hangover (S Auld et al, 1982 - ).  Ergo, no preservatives in German beer = no hangover.

I can unequivocally tell you that Professor Auld’s thesis, with all respect, is entirely incorrect.  It is now Monday, and almost 48 hours after the event I am enjoying a monstrous headache and an all-round feeling of queasiness.  Maybe I am just getting old.

There is only one cure - to the pub for a couple of tasty belgian ales!  After all, everyone knows that when you drink a German beer and a Belgian beer in succession, they cancel each other out (S Auld et al, A Random Night On the Lager, c. 2005).

Tschüss!

The Wombat

“Excuse me Ms. Office Manager, I would really like to smoke crack at my large mahogany desk.”

“I’m sorry Wombat Esq., but that’s against the firm’s policy on drug use during working hours”.

“What if I bill it?”

“Well, nobody really reads that policy booklet bullshit anyway. Go on, go ahead.”

See? Awesome.  Nothing is worse than being surrounded by raging red tape merchants, bureaucrats and dangerously militant naysayers.  The guy that designed bureaucracy was clearly a crack-smoking employee seeking to do as little as possible.  He certainly achieved that, since major daily milestones around here include going for coffee, reading the newspaper, and filling in Form 347859-9: Request for Militant Naysaying Confirmation of Lunch Subsidy.   What that drug-addled individual didn’t realise, however, was that the “bureaucracy sucks” model allows you to smoke as much crack as you like on the job, provided you can justify it with the dollars. 

Sitting across from me is a French woman who epitomises this horrendous inefficiency, with none of the clean, Ikea-loving benefits of bureaucracy.  She resembles a very large, ugly mouse.  She has a big nose and otherwise mousey features, including small dark eyes, pointy ears and sharp teeth.  To top it off, she has mousey-brown hair that she pulls into a bun.  

Unfortunately, her behaviour is anything but mousey.  She blows her nose like a truckdriver.  She chews gum like she is jackhammering concrete, and in the process salivates and slobbers like a bulldog in heat.  She is probably the most obnoxious person I have met (this month) and swears in English and French constantly.  It is actually quite offensive…Oh, there she goes again, as I sit here looking at her: “putain de merde”.

She does no work.  Ever.  What’s more, she abuses the nice Bangladeshi cleaning lady who comes by each morning to change the bins, with a kind of superiority that makes my stomach turn.  She is not even qualified yet.  Yesterday I asked her to lay off the cleaning lady and pick on somebody else.  She responded contemptuously: “OK, perhaps I pick on you then”.

Charming.  Anyway, all of this is completely beside the point; I just needed to rant a bit. 

I decided to visit Amsterdam with my sister and my usual Cheese Eating partner in crime, Régis, as well as two of his friends.  We shall speak of one of them later.

As much as I enjoy the  place, Amsterdam isn’t my favourite big city.  It is chaotic, there are Dutch people on bikes zooming all over the place with calamitous Dutch indifference, and it is packed to the gills with Easyjet English guys looking to get as baked as possible.  I much prefer the outskirts of the centre, where life is more relaxed, real people live and where the yobbos don’t bother to go.

I have probably commented on this before, but I am amazed by Mother England’s persisting failure to add some more chlorine to her gene pool.  Someone has unloaded a large, steaming, British turd into it and there it is, floating gloriously along the surface, with little chunks of porridge and carrot in it.  Yet nobody seems to mind.  Why is it that so many English males are so ugly?  Why is their skin so poxy, their teeth so bad, their stomachs so fat, and why do they have heads shaped like potatoes?  You really can spot a troupe of Pommy males in Amsterdam a mile away.  They’re the extremely ugly ones, gaffawing at the prostitutes, ordering Old Speckled Hen from Belgian beer cafés and eating hashcakes for lunch like they’ll never have another meal in their life.  Why are they there? Don’t they have a coalmine to dig, or something?  I’m told that these packs of bellowing, smelly buffoons often cross The Channel for bucks parties, but that in itself alerts me to another of life’s mysteries:  what non-blind woman without a fourth nipple and a mullet would marry one of these guys?

Here I was, wandering around Amsterdam with my sister and three Cheese Eating Stoner Monkeys, one of whom seemed to be on a higher mission to get as demolished as humanly possible.  For the sake of anonymity, I will call this fellow Pierre.  He was a little on the chubby side, most likely as a result of getting stoned and devouring entire packets of chips on a regular basis.  He had a blond beard that would have worked, but for the fact that half of it didn’t exist.  The mangy remainder made him look like a burns victim.

Sitting in a coffee shop, I saw Pierre destroy, in effect, 2 large joints, as well as a hash muffin and a cookie.    He then devoured a massive piece of hash-infused chocolate cake with chocolate icing and green sprinkles.  More than a little stoned myself, I sat bemused, watching this marijuana-consuming force of nature make passionate love to the god of green.  When I asked whether it might have been a good idea to slow down a tad, chill out a little, he responded bluntly, “nothing is working”, and continued to blaze and munch like a madman.  Rather baked philosophically, I began to ponder the utility in expanding an empty mind.  Moreover, what is the meaning of…huh?…what?…I forgot.  Régis looked at me wistfully.  He knew what was coming.

Within an hour it was all over.

Pierre, this Frenchman of supreme arrogance and stoner fortitude, was reduced to a quivering, tripping mess.  As we walked towards the station, I asked him if he was okay. 

“Il y a une vache sur mon dos.”

“I’m sorry.  Can I just clarify, did you just say that there is a cow on your back?”

“Yes.  But I cannot move my head.  I cannot turn to look at you.  There is a cow on my back.  The cow will not stay on my back if I turn to look at you.”

“OK, well, isn’t that a good thing?”

“No.  I am balanced.”

“Balanced?”

“Balanced.”

In this state of bovine equilibrium, we parted ways for the evening.  I saw him the next morning where he fell asleep at MacDonalds, then went off to smoke more joints and drive back to Paris, baked as a cake and no doubt an even fatter, mangier stoner than when we first met.

Outrageous!

Love,

Wombat

To anyone sitting at a desk surrounded by vainglorious arsehats who do nothing but squint shortsightedly at their reflected self-importance; to anyone languishing for hours in boredom or suffering in stress while the world passes by: get out now.  Quit your job and start fresh.  Hand in your resignation and do something absurd.  Make a difference, if you feel like it.  You will thank yourself long after you close your bank account.

Don’t worry - no one will remember what you did when it’s too late.  They will remember how you did it, and why.

I have purchased a shiny dutch bike that I have dubbed “The Babushka” on account of its grandma-ish frame.  It travels at approximately the same speed as my grandma as well, but that is just fine with me.  There is nothing more pleasant than pedalling indifferently through an indifferent city.  Having a bike also offers one the chance to unleash some spectacular cropdusts on unwitting individuals and make a quick getaway, with the added advantage of no “friendly fire” (i.e., cropdusting yourself).

My biggest issue currently is that I really need a haircut.  Some commentators have questioned its timeless style.  In the words of one:

“Dude, what is doing with that mop? It appears that a small rodent has perished on your head.”

(S. Foster et al, August 2008).

It may have perished in August, but Oh! what a glorious afterlife that small rodent has entered!  No doubt somebody paid the boatman his coins and then some.   My current plumage is magnificent: a glorious cross between a wombat (of course), a porcupine and an albatross in full flight.  Spectacular is not enough! Amazing does not even begin to cover it!  Transcendental may be the right word here.

Nonetheless, the rest of the world has never quite been able to enter the dimension of style that I operate in.  It’s not their fault: not everyone has the ability to open wormholes and transcend space and time with their hair.

Regardless, the time has come to remove it, since I do need to retain an air of respectability in my professional appearance. The days of rockstardom are over, for now at least.  I will surely miss it, but that isn’t the problem.  I have only one major reservation:

The prospect of a “Dutch Haircut”.

Dutch are odd people, and extremely proud of it.  They are so odd, in fact, that they seem to have trademarked their oddity with their own saying:

“God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.”

I think this has less to do with the enormous amount of reclaimed land in the country and more to do with their proud international identity as a sixteen-and-a-half-million-strong bunch of weird people.  On the whole (and apologies for the stereotype) I find them extremely direct (”You don’t look very attractive today”), with a weird sense of humour (they’re big into non-sequiturs). They speak the ugliest language on the planet and enjoy parading naked around their large-windowed living rooms.  The women range from the extremely attractive to the unassailably ugly, with a slight skew towards the latter.  The men, on average, are very tall (at an average height of six-foot-one) and in my observation, tend to possess a larger-than-average Adam’s Apple.

Most, if not all, Dutch men sport a “Dutch Haircut”, or a variation thereof.

Let me explain: there is nothing organic about a Dutch Haircut.  It is a carefully calculated piece of human outrage designed to offend all but the wearer and his Dutch compatriots.  This careful design is a bit of a paradox since the ultimate shape resembles chaotic concept art.  Overly short on the back and sides, the apex of the head and the fringe offers a sprout of unchecked follicular growth that transforms the head into the shape of a question mark.  Blond specimens look particularly disgraceful, especially with huge amounts of hair gel and when riding a queer dutch bike.

It is the kind of cut that people wouldn’t comment on unless they really knew you extremely well, for fear that self-realisation might lead to jumping out a window.

And so, I am afraid that my current rug of glory will morph into a mirror-smashing question mark of Dutch quirkiness.  I am concerned that I, the expat Wombat at large, will look just a little too Dutch, thereby losing my English speaking privileges in Den Haag and suffering great(er) animosity at the hands of the French.  I am also concerned that when my lovely fiancée arrives from the Antipodes, she will not recognise the Wombat she has come to know and love.

So what do I do?  This is a dilemma: please help me out.  I travelled to Amsterdam on the weekend and Brussels the week before, and have penned some preliminary commentaries on those.  Will write more soon, but until then, remain outrageous at all times.

Love,

Wombat

What a ghetto.  I headed for the hostel tout de suite, only to find that it was simply a ghetto with a roof.  The place smelled like a nursing home.  There were a bunch of young ferals from Germany getting naked in the half-sun on the patio outside.  I decided to embrace the rankness and paid my 110 euros for four nights’accomodation (a precaution in case I couldn’t find an apartment quickly).

I walked into the room to the glorious sounds and odours of somebody totally obliterating the bathroom.  The joys of the youth hostel, I thought.  Two spanish guys with greasy hair and homoerotic magazines lazed on their beds.

“Hola.”

Presently, the bathroom destroyer appeared.  He was anything but youthful.  At least 60, in my estimation.

“From where are you?” he asked, in Borat english.

“Australia.  How about you?”

“Not Australia.”  That was it.

My first thought was that this guy could only be one of three things.  He might be a vagrant. He might be a fugitive.  Or, worst of all, he could be a raging kiddiebutthunter trawling for action at a youth hostel.

I didn’t press the question.  I set to unpacking and he slinked over to his bed and flopped heavily onto it.  He looked up at the underside of the top bunk indifferently, and then with great concentration and an outrageous lack of concern for the others in the room, let out a big, wet, extremely audible fart, reclining his legs a bit and exhaling with extreme satisfaction.  He then rolled languidly onto his side and fell asleep, just like that.

Stunned, I spent a minute or two studying the horrendous beast that had infiltrated the room.  He had a head like a big brown lump of wet clay and a nose that resembled a beaten up old pipe.  He had piggish eyes that were certainly too close together, but were probably useful for peering into enclosed spaces (such as rubbish bins).

The most striking aspect of the man, undoubtedly, was the vile stench which emanated from every single pore on his manky, sunburned body.  I’ve met some blokes that aren’t really into showering, but this fellow embraced a whole new level of pungent seediness.  He was a walking colonic irrigation gone horribly wrong.  A petri-dish of all things foul. He wore his stench like a big overcoat:  It was all-encompassing.

Pong-tastic stuff.

It was so bad, in fact, that I during our brief conversation, I convinced myself that I had crawled inside an elephant’s arsehole and inhaled deeply.

I am a person who holds deep respect for anyone that does their ‘thing’ well.  Some people are fantastic at, say, painting.  Other people are famed for their amazing driving skills.  Others are even renowned for not being particularly good at anything.  (I don’t really have any respect for the last group.)

I have to be truthful with you; I felt a certain level of respect for this crazy mediterranean guy with intolerable body odour.  I doubt I could live with myself, sitting in a puddle of personal poosmells all day, but clearly the gentleman was fairly accustomed to his dreadful aroma.  I’m really not exaggerating: every time the fellow moved, his body released a new and fruity stink, allowing those in the room to sample a new and pungent ”flavour” every few minutes.  The rancid odours poured out every conceivable orifice, like sounds from a pipe organ.  It was random, obnoxious, and in a bizarre way, brilliant.  It coated the back of my mouth and made me want to spew.  Can you taste it?  I hope not.

I’m going to call him Emre.  I was told by an equally frightened traveller that he was Turkish.  Ex-army, he’d heard.  Dangerous.  Ate cats.  I thought that was a load of shit.

Also occupying my room were, as I previously mentioned, two spanish greaseballs who tried to take their mind off the smell by reading homoerotic magazines.  I’m sorry, but putting a semi naked girl on the cover does not alter the fact that behind her are 80 pages of Yves Saint Laurent ads featuring topless men with big pectorals.  They spoke spanish and didn’t want to be spoken to.  That would have been fine, but with the cat-eating, ex-Turkish army smellogram Emre in the bunk next to mine, I felt like I needed an ally or two.  At the pub downstairs I befriended this random dutch guy from Utrecht, bonding on stories of how wierd Emre was, and how he might be fugitive, and that he stank like a massive heap of shit.  Coincidentally, he was in the bunk immediately below me.  I don’t remember his name.  Let’s go with Ruud.  That’s a good dutch name.  I figured by the look of his wierd “dutch haircut” (I’ll explain another time) that he wasn’t Turkish.

The friendship soured somewhere around 2am, when Ruud began snoring in a particularly quirky (Dutch) fashion.  I’ve stayed in rooms sleeping in excess of 30 people and can handle a rhythmic snorer, and even the occasional mumbled sleeptalk.   Unfortunately, Ruud’s eine kleine nachtmusik was a combination of spastic choking sounds, gurgling, and aggressive sleeptalk, punctuated with scattergun SNORT sounds.  Every now and then Ruud would get a rhythm going and I was able to tune him out.  Then there’d come a loud SNORT, more gurgling, more talking, and spastic noises.

Goddamn Ruud.  That disgusting unit.  Never trust the dutch.

So I’m sure you can imagine the scene.  I’m lying there in this rank, fleabitten hostel bed, swimming in a bog of eternal stench, enjoying the sounds of the retarded dutch wildlife convention.  It was giving me the royal shits.  I had bought a bottle of pepsi and I lay there, eyeing it on top of the cupboard, debating whether to take a little caffeine hit and go for a walk, or to try and get to sleep (against all odds).  I started to doze a bit. Then the pepsi bottle moved.

I thought that maybe I was dreaming, so I lay there still.  Then I heard a loud slurping sound, followed by the sound of a plastic lid being replaced, and a breathy burp.  Then the pepsi bottle was replaced, softly and deliberately, and turned carefully so that the label was in the exact same place it had always been.

I sat up and copped a whiff.  Right there, standing right by my bunk, was Emre, looking a bit sheepish.  I scowled at him and he scuttled away.  To be honest, I was pretty taken aback.  Granted, it was just a pepsi, but there’s an unspoken rule that one doesn’t touch another’s stuff in hostels.  Ever.

The whole thing made me feel a bit uneasy.  I lay back down, swore loudly to express my distaste and shut my eyes.

It didn’t matter how much I tried to take my mind off it, I just could not sleep.  I lay there in the dark for (what seemed) an age, listening to Miles Davis through my headphones.  I turned over and faced the wall and must have stayed there, half dosing, for at least an hour.  The album came to an end and I took my earphones out.

I smelt him before I saw him, but I instantly knew what he was doing.  There, in the dark, that crazy Turkish bastard was rifling through my baggage.

I sat up, furious, and bellowed at him.  “Hey!! What in Christ’s name are you doing?”

I think I scared the shit out of him because he bailed out immediately, charging into the toilet and slamming the door.

Ten minutes later, and after flushing the toilet an obscene number of times (I didn’t think I’d scared him that much, but I guess I really did) he walked out sheepishly.  I imagine he was hoping in his rusty, kleptomanic head that I had fallen asleep.  Not likely.  It was 4am, and I was in a foul, foul mood.  I gave him mouthful of expletives and pointed the contaminated pepsi bottle at him.  “See this,” I said, “you smelly piece of shit? if you touch my stuff one more time, I will ram this up your arsehole. Get it?”

Emre grunted and climbed back into bed.  Who knows whether he’d understood me fully, but the message was clear. Ruud, despite the calamity, had continued to snore as ruthlessly as Hitler.  I had had enough.  I climbed down from the bunk, flipped the smelly turk the bird (just in case) and busted out into the quiet dawn.  I had enormous motivation to find an apartment, despite a complete lack of sleep.  For four hours before the businessmen started work I visited the windows of real estate agents in non-ghetto neighbourhoods until I found something that appealed.  By 10am, I had secured a place and was ready to roll out of the rank hostel.

“Oh, I am so so sorry - we don’t give refunds” said the feral behind the desk, feigning sympathy.

No matter, I was out.  Not being able to move into my new place for 24 hours,  I checked into a marginally more expensive hotel and enjoyed a 2 x 3m broom closet for the night.  But there were no smelly turkish men going through my stuff.  I even checked the wardrobe.

It only gets better from here.  More human experiences to come shortly!

Love,

Wombat