http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6mbx182oag

Beautifully written, beautifully made and a beautiful example of how much people can give to something they love, like their kids, or plain old footy, without being paid big bucks or lavished with attention.

It also says to girls and young women something you’d kinda hope to say to every kid: that what you do with your time is valuable. That even if it doesn’t feel like people care, hard work is its own reward. That sooner or later, the world will notice. That you should and can do whatever you choose to do, even if it doesn’t seem glamorous or impressive.

But for girls, that’s where it gets a bit tricky. If you get what you want, and if what you want is a chance to make a living in rugby league, then all of a sudden there’s a whole lot of can’t in your life.

Can’t buy shoes with peep-toes anymore cause people with spikes are running in the vicinity.
Can’t quite manage to find a unisex polo shirt that fits.
Can’t travel with the team cause there’s no-one to room with.
Can’t pee for the next twenty minutes cause there are naked dudes in there changing.
Can’t go into the sheds with the other journos and interview players because the stadium security guard doesn’t think ladies belong there.
Can’t guarantee I won’t crack it if another person asks me where I “picked up” my workmates when they see us in a pub.
Can’t get drawn into an argument when people say the team’s playing “like fucking girls!”
Can’t remember the last time you got your hair-colour done.
Can’t be bothered answering that question in the press box cause you always just ask my male colleague afterwards anyway.

But the truth is … can’t is not unusual. You can’t find an easy job in footy, no matter how hard you look and no matter what you’re hiding under your team-issue trackies. For most, a full-time job means seven days a week, because footy waits for no man (or woman). It means arriving at 8am to start supervising preparations for a 7.30pm kick-off. It means staying until 1am to film and upload press conferences and interviews. It means coming into the office at 5am to read through all the emails from fans with suggestions for changes to the playing roster: “dear sir, thank you for your email …”

I’ve met the ladies and men who do all those jobs.

For the guys who wear jerseys, it means pushing your body to its limits, a public private life, and the chance that living your dream will leave you in pain for the rest of your life.

So why would you bother? At least the players get fame for a little while, glory if they’re lucky, and riches if they sign up with a media network once they retire.

Everyone else just gets a polo shirt and a party pie on game day.

The real question is how could you NOT bother?

For every johnny anonymous who calls you a slut, there are ten men with the kind of crows feet that come from watching a footy team train every morning who will sit down and have a beer with you and talk about the game. For a girl who’s been more used to being told she doesn’t understand offside and marker defence, that feels like a gold medal.

Honestly, it’s not soccer! IT’S PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD. I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND.

Or a premiership-winning captain who’ll stick his head in and tell you that you look like a million bucks. Probably because you wore lipstick that day. Fancy!

Best of all, there’s the hug that comes after you win a game you were written-off in and you could swear every one of your 8pm rage-outs in the office actually helped it happen.

There is nothing like it. It’s the closest you can ever hope to get to the game you love. Toilets with no hand soap in them don’t mean much in comparison.

Sure, maybe because of your ladyparts … you could never have achieved it in an NRL jersey. But you got the next best thing.

And that’s the answer to the final question: why Women in League round?

Because, like men who want to become nurses, or women who want to fix cars, women who make a living in rugby league do it hard. They take second-best to get there from people who don’t think chicks belong anywhere near a footy field, or people who simply think they’re strange.

Sometimes, they take second-best because they think there will never be a chance for them to run out in a women’s rugby league competition for anything more than a bag of peanuts and a few heckles.

And outside the NRL, they do it for love not money. They do it to try and make sure that their own kids can have everything they want, including a chance to put on their size small junior socks and play footy on the weekend.

So why not have a week to stop and say to all the women in league: good job, ladies … and sorry about the polo shirts.

Paul Pottinger thinks our beloved rugby league is an atrocity.

First of all, atrocity is not a word to be thrown around lightly, young man. (Old man? Middle-aged man? Who knows. We care not for proper research. Would much prefer to eat crisps and watch cricket).

‘Atrocity’ is Significant. It should be saved for situations where it is warranted, like war crimes, Kardashians and Queensland winning a seventh Origin.

Mysterious-aged-Paul tells us no footy means none of the:

“… stifling tedium of blanket coverage, the grinding banality of match commentary, the sub-trivial parish pump gossip and news of yet another player’s off-field atrocity.”

“The featureless white noise of the mate-against-mate, meathead-against-meathead cavalcade is comfortably distant; just a grim prospect. Like root canal treatment.”

Pretty sure as soon as Robbie Farah comes home from the cricket and Ben Te’o finishes his law readings for the day they will both be OUTRAGED at being called meatheads, Paolo.

(Can we call you Paolo? We think it makes you sound more festive.)

Apparently Paolo has a few gripes with footy.

Number one is that a non-Yank once missed his flight and then played for the Tomahawks.

You know who’s missed a flight and isn’t mentioned in this article? EVERYONE WE KNOW.

You know who has a particularly loose grasp on the concept of international allegiance and isn’t mentioned in this article? EVERYONE IN ENGLISH CRICKET.

It’s probably not even worth pointing out that calling our special brand of footy “a loud provincial oaf let loose upon the big city – obnoxious, flatulent and prone to publicly displaying its genitals” is pretty damn ironic. It’s actually the verbal equivalent of a giant blimp named “the Irony” that flies around in the airspace above rural Victoria filled with pantsless players from St Kilda.

SEE WHAT WE DID THERE? Almost as good as when we put a CRL logo on an orange.

Number two is that we have tackles, and not proper ye olde rucks. This is ‘manufactured’. As opposed to say, NFL. Or penalty goals. Or anything else that happens due to rules and not the natural flow of a bunch of guys holding a ball.

Oh honey, we are sensing a pattern. Despite being pretty much dudes in dresses, we do occasionally do girly things.

We have spent countless hours with our girls getting drunk, eating cheese and analysing why boys do the things they do.

Why does he like her? Why didn’t he call? What does this text mean? HE WROTE AN X AT THE END THAT MEANS HE LOVES ME RIGHT? Yeah, we’re neurotic and stereotypical. We admit it.

But all that experience is why we were able to come up with some special ladylike insight into Paolo’s opinion piece.

He doesn’t really hate league cause of it’s American-football-style corporate sponsorship, the money it – like AFL – gets from booze companies, its rules, how muscly its players are, or the fact that, like Rugby union, there are only four countries with a proper hope in hell of winning each World Cup.

Nope, like he says, he doesn’t dislike it at all.

What he really hates is that other people adore it. It’s just like when your ex-boyfriend gets his next girlfriend. You don’t actually hate this girl, even if she the lady equivalent of rugby league. You don’t hate her cause she’s brassy or loud, hates wearing pants, loves smashing too many cans, tells the same stories or says inappropriate things. Not gonna lie, that was just a description of our worst qualities.

You feel like ya hate her cause he likes her more than you. Just like Paolo hates rugby league, and not other sports with the same sponsors or scandals. Paolo hates that the Sydney papers and his neighbours down the street like it more than … whatever he follows. For some reason it feels like it’s probably rugby union as well as MMA. And even though MMA is objectively AWESOME, the whole thing is still better summed up with a different four-letter word: envy.

Confession: we do all care to a creepy degree. WE JUST REALLY LOVE FOOTY. Why else would we give a shit that Ben Hannant had swine flu? Or that Brett White enjoys Bonsai as a hobby? Dude’s right to be envious of how much passion there is for league, on and off the field. It’s why we like punch-ons. It’s proof they’re feeling as angry as we are.

Our saints are like B.Moz, the NSW winger with the broken leg who leaps onto it anyway. Our holy day is when we stop and remember John Sattler’s broken jaw.

And despite what ya might think, Paolo, that passion is why footy is on your back pages eight months a year, not the fact that the sport continued through WWI. Sometimes players punch on, sometimes they get outed on TV for having the runs, sometimes TVs fall apart and Billy Idol happens, but we love our league anyway.

How did the Johnny Come Comparatively Lately code wrest popularity from its parent? By inherent superiority? Crowd-pleasingly open play? Or the fact that for five seasons it was the only game in town?

The NSW and Queensland rugby unions suspended senior competition during World War I. Rugby league did not. When Balmain played Glebe in the 1915 grand final, young men were being sacrificed at Gallipoli. The Queensland Rugby Union was unable to reform until 1929.

By no means do I impugn those who played on or to suggest that many thousands have not worn both khaki and club colours. But it does strike me as a slightly anomalous note when the code wraps itself in the flag and has the Last Post played at its Anzac Day Test.

There are only three paragraphs in your article that make us angry, and there they are! As entertaining as it might be to think league joyfully embraced World War as an opportunity to play more games, grow their brand and conquer the Australian market while the soldier’s backs were turned … BITCH PLEASE.

Yes, and they probably also went back to the sheds afterwards and laughed it up at how funny it was that their friends and countrymen were dying, too, huh?

If you wanna know more about all the OTHER sports that played on through the war, RL1908 can tell you all about ‘em.

And if you wanna read a much more smarterer and more eloquent guy explaining why he loves rugby league despite/because of its violence, you should read Murderous Exhibitions by Michael Winkler. It’s AMAZING.

In the meantime, we’re gonna drink some industrial beer and count down to round one, and let Gretchen Weiners sum this whole thing up in one easy sentence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnsMCnAxxzo

Love and kisses,
Kiki and Sassy

Congratulations Queensland! You have 6 Origin victories in a row, all neatly lined up to match your 6 toes. And we don’t want to be sore losers, so we’ve graced Errol with the new Queensland state flag (see above). See! We are totally down with good sportsmanship and giving credit when it’s due.

As for the game, well … it happened. And the world is still turning. Not gonna lie though, that shit hurt. This arvo a bloke came into Kiki’s workplace brazenly wearing a maroon scarf. After she launched a tirade of abuse at him he very nervously squeaked ‘sorry bro, I’m from New Zealand … I didn’t even think! It’s just cold today hey….’

Sorry mate. Speaking of New Zealanders in maroon scarves, what in the hell was Sonny Bill Feelings doing on the sidelines giving his expert commentary? WHY? Why do Channel 9 constantly give air time to other sports during rugby league programming? That shit has to end.

More importantly, why was SBW wearing a maroon scarf? Oh that’s right, coz he’s a hateful turncoat with no soul who sneaks away in the middle of the night because he doesn’t want tell his team mates he’s leaving. YEH WE HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN THAT SONNY BILL. Remember when you played for NSW Schoolboys SBW?

Just imagine us doing this while we type. It is 65% accurate.

And we need to talk about that Darren Lockyer ‘tribute’. It’s taken us almost a whole day to digest that. That was by far the most upsetting thing we’ve ever seen. And we used to be regulars at a certain 24-hour establishment in Taylor Square that shall remain nameless so we have seen THINGS. Trust this.

We would find the video on You Tube and dissect it piece by piece but our constitutions are too delicate to be put through that. We love you guys and all, but not that much.

The bottom line is we love a montage. Absolute BANDITS for one. The music, the slow-mo, the hazy after-effects. Aaaah, bliss! But watching close-ups of Darren Lockyer’s black eye and the town of Roma set to a tinkly piano tune stolen from a serial killer re-enactment on the Crime Investigation channel is not enjoyable.

In other circumstances, we would probably just hate Lockyer like we hate all Queenslanders: when they wear maroon / when they get Queensland tattoos / for three nights a year.

But every time people from North of the Tweed tell us Darren Lockyer is a legend, a Prince, or a hero, it annoys the hell out of us.

So watching creepy video packages about Darren Lockyer’s home town is WORSE THAN THE WORST.  How dare you try and make us Feel Feelings about a man with five Origin series wins in a row!

Yesterday Kiki accidentally saw photos on the interwebz of a smashed up dead body after a car accident. There was visible brain matter. That was less upsetting than the Lockyer tribute.

Remember when Mufasa gets trampled alive after saving Simba in the Lion King? That is less upsetting than the Lockyer tribute.

One time we watched a documentary on Foxtel about people who fall in love with, and have sex with, inaminate objects. One particularly memorable scene shows a lady making out with a rollercoaster.

That is less upsetting than the Lockyer tribute.

See where we’re going with this? Darren Lockyer may be a ‘legend’, and he’s had a fantastic career, but he is not OUR legend. Just like how John Howard was never our Prime Minister. Doesn’t matter how many montages we’re forced to watch, or live crosses to his brain (seriously …) or tweets of OMGZ U GUYZ HOW CAN U NOT RESPECT LOCKYER!!111!…..we just don’t get it. And we will never will.

More importantly, Queensland, you may have Lockyer but you will never be this adorable. Hah!

Mainly this is because, for every Queenslander who is normal and functional, there is a Queenslander – a FEMALE Queenslander – who pees on their seat. At Suncorp Stadium. While Lockyer is giving his speech. And y’all wonder why we make fun of you … seriously.

(DISCLAIMER: WE DON’T WANT TO LINK IT THIS CAUSE IT’S TOO GROSS. YOU’LL HAVE TO GOOGLE.)

We know that last night’s game wasn’t NSW’s finest moment. As in … we know our boys can do better than this. They HAVE done better than this. Like Parramatta smashing the Bulldogs in the 2009 finals series, we peaked a game too early.

But if the Blues played 95% in game two, we’d call this 80. Don’t ya think? Eighty percent execution, maybe due to nerves. There were still some barnstorming Aku Uate runs, some delightful footwork from Jamie Soward when he carried instead of kicked, and incredible defence. But there were also a lot of kicks straight into Maroons players arms, kicks to places kicks should not go, a few dumb penalties, and that time Minichiello tripped over.

We know Birdy … we feel the same.

It’s possible that Ronnie Palmer also accidentally set the Gallen-bot to just ‘main’ instead of ‘DECIMATE’ which is what he did in game two.

Just because he’s a machine doesn’t mean he can’t feel.

But in the next column over, we give the Blues 100% for heart. Mick Ennis showed so much heart that he broke his sternum.

At times they were majestic to watch. Like when Luke Lewis wove his bogan mojo and the Blues charged through a mess of sprawling Maroons to score our first try.

What can we say except … footyboner.

We is PROUD.

And to prove that we do have hearts, we’ll admit that Sassy was legitimately distressed when Johnathon Thurston was injured. (Kiki had no opinion because she had been banished to her room)

We love watching him laugh his dopey laugh, even when it’s because he’s come back on field in a wheelchair and is completely off his face from the pain medication he’s sucking down on.

Pssst, pass the green whistle, would ya, JT? NSW NEEDS IT TOOOOO.

The bottom line though, is this. We aren’t broken yet. You won’t catch us telling anyone Origin is dead.

Queensland, you’ve won 6 in a row. You may win 7 or even 10 in a row. But know this: it will never be easy. We will fight you for every metre. You will have to earn every inch, every blade of grass.

You will bleed. We will hit you … hard. Bones will break and muscles will tear and we will be there every single year to hurt you again and again and again. No victory will be effortless.

Know this too: we hate you. We hate your maroon jerseys, your smugness and your blatant player stealing. We hate your cheap shots, the bizarre Lockyer worship and your complete lack of irony.

You may dominate on the scoreboard but despite your self mythologizing fantasies, you will never dominate in heart. Don’t you ever get comfortable, because we will never submit.

UP THE BLUES!

Game pics. Getty Images

So until we get twenty minutes to ourselves to sip one of intern John-John’s margaritas and bash out something new, here’s a photo of Beau Scott looking like a hilarious old man:

More here

Or if you really can’t bear to be without us for one more day, why don’t you run out and grab the latest issue of Shop til you Drop (with Samantha Harris on the cover!) for some words of wisdom from Sassy:

And to make sure you know when we update, remember you can add us to your google reader or any other RSS-contraption (the RSS is in the left hand column) OR you can add us on bloglovin:

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We loved it almost as much as this moment:

When Nathan Hindmarsh accidentally walked through shot while Jebediah put on the pre-game entertainment. Oh Hindy, we love you more than life. Especially for tweeting the evidence, because Kiki missed it during the game. There are many things that Would Only Happen In Rugby League. The swine flu outbreak of 2009, brawls in a charity match to raise money for flood victims, heads being stapled up on the sideline…and of course, the moment above. LOVE YA RUGBY LEAGUE!

But back to Ennis: does it count as Cattledog? Sadly, no.

So instead, we’re saving this game’s prize, and next game there will be TWO prizes. One for the closest Queenslander and one for the closest Blue. We are all about fairness.

Luckily, in place of a a biff, we had 80 full minutes of New South Wales glory. Let’s break it down, shall we?

SOMETHING OLD

Oh, Anthony Minichiello, how we missed you! No one teaches children how to count like you do. If we ever needed proof that old men still got it, Mini brought it. Under the high ball? Safe as houses! He probably has many of them, too, as investment properties, because he’s old. Seriously, he’s in his thirties. That’s like being 80 in regular person years, and we all know old people love real estate. Plus he had to do something with all that spare time while he recuperated from injury.

Mini’s catch of the high ball in-goal was a thing of beauty, and seeing him sail over for a try brought a tear to Sassy’s eye. He’s a recycled fullback but he’s as good as new. Plus, he matches beautifully with our recycled coach, Ricky Stuart, recycled centre, Mark Gasnier, and shiny recycled utility book-ends Kurt Gidley and Luke Lewis.

One of our favourite hobbies is saying Kurt Gidley ruins things. Because, well, he often does. Not necessarily through incompetence or malice, but usually, just by being where he’s asked to be.

Gidley can ruin an Origin game out on the field the same way a whale ruins a picnic table … just by being on it.

Gidley ruins Origin the way a fly ruins a bowl of soup. Or a bird poo ruins a perfectly clean car. It’s all about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And by wrong place, we mean ‘captaining from the bench’, or ‘NSW fullback’. Sure it’s not his fault, but when the bird’s not around, you get angry at the poo. You know?

Know where he doesn’t ruin things? PLAYING INTERCHANGE DUMMY HALF.

Seeing Gidley come off the bench last night was like seeing a whale leap back into the ocean.

FREE GIDLEY! SWIM FREE OUR PROUD BALINE FRIEND!

He was quick with the ball from the ruck, his off-loads were sneaky and plentiful. It’s not a coincidence that when he came on the NSW attack lifted in intensity. We were approx. 62% more dangerous. It’s just science.

What can a girl say except #BOGANBONER?

And if Free Gidley was responsible for 18% of that made up statistic, our man Luke Lewis was the rest. What a spectacular human. When Josh ‘Hot Bogan’ Dugan was felled by injury we were worried our bogan quota would go unfilled but thankfully for NSW, Luke Lewis came roaring into the side. AND HOW! In years to come, aliens will try and figure out our culture by watching video of him looming from the right of frame, powering like a cannon ball to slam into Cooper Cronk (lucky for Fierce Bitch Cooper he is partly adamantium and therefore uncrushable) and save a Maroons try.

Sassy told Twitter last night that she was starting to have the kind of thoughts about Luke Lewis  that lead to dreams of getting married in Penrith and serving home brew at the reception, and after a night to think about it Kiki’s totally on board too. How can we resist that frosty-haired spunk? LUKE. CALL US YOU HOT ANGRY BOGAN.

Whats that? How can you guys have a crush on a man who proudly sports blonde foils in the year 2011? Pleaaaaase. Everyone knows Australian sporting power prowess has a direct connection to hair bleach and streaking caps. See below.

Now all of you kneel and pay homage to the lord of the #boganboner. Thanks.

SOMETHING NEW

Oh good lord, Will Hopoate. What are you doing to us, boy? Playing with so much confidence, scoring a try in the corner like a less-Maroon and less-hateful Justin Hodges, deciding to leave us for two years, LOOKING LIKE THAT. If having dirty thoughts about a 19 year old Mormon is wrong, we don’t wanna be right. Don’t lie, you all did too. Even the straight men.

As much as we respect his choice to go on his mission and spend two years testing young ladies’ ability to concentrate on things other than staring at Hoppa, we can’t wait for him to come back into the loving arms of NSW. Ho.Ju you are a revelation, to the fans AND to newspaper sub-editors who get to make up witty ‘mission’ headlines about you. Also, we hope you enjoyed the slightly smuttier ‘missonary’ jokes we made on Twitter during the game.

At first we were mourning the loss of such a beautiful caramel man to religion, then Errol bestie and generally awesome human, Bec, suggested that we should take advantage of his Mormonism and…wait for it….MARRY HIM! This is the best idea we’ve ever heard and have so far recruited Errol friendz Kaz and Anna to be our sister wives. We love big hair and pastel colours and communal kitchens. This can’t go wrong!

The Hopoate sister wives agree, their husband’s eyelashes really are spectacular.

And come on down, NSW’s new starting five-eighth!

Jamie Soward has long been an Errol fave. We didn’t come late to the party. We are always ahead of the pack, some may call us innovators, cultural zeitgeists and visionaries…. and we have to agree. Much like Uncle Wayne, we’ve always believed in Sowie’s ability. Unlike Uncle Wayne, we say things like ‘fuck all y’all haterz’ when he plays his heart out and proves bitches everywhere wrong.

We honestly don’t understand the Sowie hate. He is adorable. A bossy little bitch who kicks like an angel and yells at us for running in a water park (long story). The biggest criticism he cops is that he doesn’t run at the line enough. Or that when the game is on the line he doesn’t make the big plays. Well now…take one look at that try he set up for Mini and you tell us….IS THAT A LINE RUN OR WHAT? HUH? BIG PLAY YES? Yeh, thought so. Now all of you eat your words while we watch and clap with delight, confirming once again : we are always right.

SOMETHING BORROWED

Usually, this section would be about Greg Inglis.

GET IT? CAUSE HE’S BORROWED FROM NEW SOUTH WALES?

But GI was surprisingly quiet last night. Quiet, and fumbly. Is he okay? (Serious question … is he?)

Machines don’t smile.

So instead, we’re gonna borrow a nickname from our idols Roy and HG, and give it to the the mighty Blues captain … O Gallen, our Captain!

We crown him the new Brick with Eyes. He’s completely rectangular and he can play Origin like a demon for a full 80 minutes. He is a straight up FREAK.

Last year (or maybe the year before, we’re bloggers not historians people!) in an argument about Toyota Park and the Sharks in general (you know we love hating them) we said the road to redemption for Gallen was to forget about the media and just focus on cleaning up his game on the field. He has. And he’s better, no? You don’t need to fuck around when you can play like that.

Luke Lewis agrees.

SOMETHING BLUE

Or, 17 something blues. Plus Tommy Learoyd-Lahrs. And Ronnie Palmer. And Jim Dym .. LOOK WE’RE JUST REALLY PROUD. OF ALL OF YOU.

To paraphrase Mitchell Pearce, it was the one of the Best Origins EVER. Greg Bird was so happy! Anthony Watmough actually broke up a fight instead of starting one! Aku Uate ran the ball as hard as Paul Gallen! Trent Merrin existed and/or was adorable:

(that one’s from Gregg Porteous)

Next step: to win the series-slash-ruin Darren Lockyer’s farewell. Like that time we stopped Queensland getting a tropical holiday. Oh man that was sweet.

Here’s to New South Wales, bogans, pettiness and victory!

Only one sleep till Origin II, babies! And before we all lose our damn minds tomorrow, we need to tell you two important things.

1. Clear your schedules cause we’re gonna be on the wireless on Triple J after 3.30pm on Wednesday, talking all things Origin. Wheee!

2. As the Blues head to victory at ANZ Stadium tomorrow night, we will be playing the second round of the legendary* Cattledog Minutes.

So what’s the deal? It’s easy. You guess the minute of the game when a Blues player first throws a punch or generally creates some argy-bargy. The way we decide whether Cattledog occurs is that the argy-bargy has to be argy and/or bargy enough to attract the referee’s attention. Too easy!

The prize for the person who gets closest is some seriously chocolatey M&M goodness in the team colour of their choice. To enter, you just have to comment here, or tell us your guess on our Facebook page or Twitter. Mmmmmmmm tastes like winning.

Thank you AGAIN to the dudes over at M&Ms for sending through some tasty Origin M&Ms for the winner. They get to pick whether they would prefer to eat their team or the opposition and we’ll post them out. Although, if you guys want some of your own and can’t mange to wait a whole day, you can get ‘em at Coles for $12.50.

The best thing about doing that is that then you can throw them at the screen and scream cattledog. Good luck!

* may not actually be legendary.

Shaggy owned last week with a perfect round (does that still get you a Whopper?) and the bestest margin:

And the omnipresent BroncoBaby is still sitting on top of the overall leaderboard with voodoorock:

Amazing work guys. In no way am I bitter at my own terrible for- … HEY! IS THAT A SHIRTLESS MAN WITH CLIPPERS?

via Gregg Porteous

Indeed it is. It’s a shirtless Jeremy Smith weilding clippers at Shark Park. And if you speak Spanish, you’ll already know that ‘Shark Park’ translates roughly to ‘graveyard of halfbacks’. We learned that from Anchorman.

The reason for the clippers? It’s call to arms week in the NRL, so the clubs and the boys are finding crafty ways to raise money and awareness for men’s cancer.

via Reece Carter

I was trying to explain this at work the other day and may have accidentally referred to it as “YOU KNOW, CANCER WEEK”, but you know what I mean. My idiot heart was in the right place. (Mainly, that’s with my burly, hilarious, polo-shirted menace of an uncle who’s having chemo for cancer at the moment … love you uncle Linden! He even had to give up drinking, which we all know is the absolute worst. Cancer, you Machiavellian bastard.)

Luckily for all of us, the Sharks decided to do this by shaving moustaches and taking their shirts off. It’s our favourite kind of fundraising. Next, we would like to suggest they wear hotpants and hold a carwash. Pretty sure Jeremy Smith would rock the hell out of a pair of American Apparel running shorts, and it’s common knowledge that everyone loves a carwash set to disco classics.

Wanna help? Here’s the list of everything happening this weekend.

Happy tipping, kids!

Stuff like Chopard watches, sky-beds and … rugby league. Ah, rugby league. The sport of kings! (The bloodthirsty Medieval kind, anyway). And luckily for all of y’all – we know you must be those kind of people considering you’re reading Errol, right? – today’s post is a wrap-up of one of the most glamorous weeks in league history. You can go ahead and read it on your customised iPad 2s on your yacht. Settle into your Eames chair and let’s get started.

We started it off with a trip to the Triple J studios to talk to the Doctor about State of Origin (national broadcaster! glamour!) and you’ll be extra proud to know that we arrived at the office during the middle of a team meeting taking place in the reception area. We hope all the loyal employees at JJJ enjoyed me walking through the door, mid-conversation, saying “YEAH I HAVE A COCK … I TUCK IT BACK WHEN I’M WEARING A TIGHT SKIRT”.

In context, it totally made sense … sort of.

And if you missed it, lucky you can listen to it online: BEHOLD THE MAGIC OF TECHNOLOGY.

Just head to six minutes in and go nuts. The Doctor’s also pretty lolz if you feel like following him on the Twitter.

But while we were busy basking in the glory of radio stardom (guest appearance! glamour!) up in Queensland things were a little more … unpleasant. The Gold Coast Titans were subjected to eight disallowed tries on Friday night. Eight! It’s a conspiracy!

Do the refs hate them because they’re beautiful?

We actually have confirmation via one of our favourite humans – George Rose – that the Titans are known as the “beautiful people”. According to Tommy Learoyd-Lahrs, soon as you hit the goldy you becaome at least 100% more attractive.

Pic. Getty Images

Would you argue with that? We wouldn’t.

The downside of course, is that you’re the coach of the woeful 2011 Titans, you have to find ways of coping with the endless run of disappointing losses and grim wins. Apparently coach Carty has chosen to cope by eating his feelings.

The beleaguered coach is rarely sighted outside his natural habitat of the coach’s ‘box’ ….

… and as a prey animal, may appear startled if he senses he is being watched. Proceed carefully.

The key sign of a coach under pressure is the loss of fine motor-skills and subsequent sausage roll disasters.

These are dark times indeed for Errol’s reigning sexiest coach in league. As for the reigning Hot Bitch Award for Hottest Bitch in League (aka Hot Bitch Cooper), the curse against the hot people of the world continues. What’s doing? Coops has a busted cheekbone from the weekend’s game:

Pic. via @RealBigdell

All this is doing is confirming our conclusions from the Great Fantasy League experiment of 2009. Hot people are FRAGILE. It’s just science.

As for south of Sydney, the Raiders haven’t named Terry Campese to play this week, which breaks our hearts a little. We love his long-range kicks and his comical Cheshire Cat grin. On the bright side, it leaves him free to continue bringing his special brand of off-field civvies glamour to our nation’s capital:

Pic via Canberra Raiders

Meanwhile in Sydney’s glorious West, the Parra Eels are bringing the glamour back to coach travel:

via Tim Mannah

Naw, he’s like a sleeping angel!

And if the boys from the lonely island have taught us anything through the magic of song, it’s that nothing is more glamorous than a boat.

Exhibit A:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfISlGLNU

Just like how Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas taught us that G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S involves flying first class, up in the sky.

This explains why the Queensland Origin team made their own salute to glamour in the form of a special trip in Careflight’s rescue boats and lifty things. See, they’re just like the gondola chairlifts at a ski resort! Except, you know, bright yellow and made of plastic. And in a pool.

Billy heard the lyrics “flossy, flossy” and did his best Flossy Nightingale expression.

Ben Hannant still goes to Taco Bell, Drives through, raw yeah

JT wants to know just who the hell thinks he’s not still real. WHO? HE’S STILL JT FROM THE BLOCK.