ABOUT HUMAN DOGS

“ The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”

Besides being a test for the keyboard it is also the core of this weeks story just in case one might be wondering what diatribe I am about to launch into.

The racing season is over once the Melbourne Cup has been run and the winner decided. I deliberately failed to participate in this years event following a disasterous error in reading the Form Guide.

Maybe this story should alert everyone not to judge a book by its cover, and never to buy yourself a book of common cliché’s and sage sayings.

I very rarely venture into the world of gambling. Being born a tightwad I am doomed to be that way till the end of days. A short flurry with Poker Machines back in the days when they had handles to pull, ending abruptly the day I received my first eviction notice from the owner of Randwick Stables where my Horse and Trap were stored. The possibility of not being able to get to work gave me a start to say the least, and decisions were made not only to stop pulling handles but to grace the lower socio-economic valleys of Randwick Racecourse.

One habit I did maintain, from being born into a dubious line of genetically inclined Trainers, Jockeys and Bookies, was to have a bob each way on the Melbourne Cup. Up until this year that is.

I have never been a lucky person. The only time I ever won a Lottery ended up by my being sent to War. One year, for example I had a dollar each way on 20 horses in the Melbourne Cup. Picking them from the longest odds in the list of runners. Now there is only 23 or 24 horses in the Cup. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out that none of my 20 horses came 1st, 2nd or even 3rd. It cost me a packet and will be an experience never to forget.

I’m so unlucky in everything that if I were to dip my hand into a bag of marbles I’d come up with a second-hand wad of bubblegum.

I’m not even lucky enough to get other people to play by the rules of the game. I am not averse to a little bending but I am to breaking them. When I do point out the error then its only to find out they were playing by one set of rules made up by themselves whilst I was going by the rules as laid down by the founders of the game and they seemed to think their rules were the better and just as legal. If you didn’t like it you could either walk off the field and leave the game or bullied into believing you’d get a punch in the head if you kept it up.

Even when I played Rugby for Randwick I would participate in a bit of bending of the rules such as lurching sideways in a lineout accidentally knocking our opponents off their feet like ninepins, or forcing the Ref to keep counting how many arms were outside the scrum to calculatre how many might be inside bashing the shit out of some opponents face. That’s sport, and sportsmanship with all its niggly little activities like slanging is really part of the game and almost tolerated by Referees.

But a good luck streak has to come my way one day.

For instance I am a member of an association in my local district that is not playing by the rules. Regardless of what I do I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. The Referee doesn’t seem to care about the multitude of breaches in the way the game is run and I worry that a ‘sporting’ organisation has taken to bending them so far that it almost feels like I’m in a totally different game altogether.

What bothers me is that I seem to be the only one who plays by the rules and cannot get the rest of the team to see where they are breaking them. The other players look at me as though I was some sort of eccentric, quizzical looks upon their face when I cite examples of where they are going wrong, or a bloke tolerated just to make pay the annual fee and up the numbers in the team.

I wasn’t able to get my way while I was on the field, so I’m going to give it a go from the sidelines. My team have just packed up their bags and gone home to prepare for the next game, the opponents go into a huddle to work out what dirty tricks they might get up to next, the Referee just keeps reiterating we must play by the rules without doing anything about it and I seem to be left standing in the middle of the oval on my pat malone as if I had just been shat on by a monstrous smelly bird.

Whether it be the Melbourne Cup, playing Rugby, trading in the Money Market (did you know that Westpac pay 2c on the $ U.S less than the publicly quoted price?), Poker Machines, Lotteries, Powerball or the dreaded Footy Tipping I never seem to be able to get a clear run.

Many people around me wonder why I sometimes spend inordinate amounts of free time worrying about how the community runs itself, how democracy is not being seen to be done when it comes to being a member of an organisation, and wonder why I want to see things being run by the rules of the game when our society and its regulators appear to have no interest in ensuring everyone plays by the rules.

Except when losing money very few people give a damn. So I wonder why I shouldn’t just shut up, pull my head in, and

“ Let sleeping Dogs lay “