My dog, when I fake throwing the ball at the park

It cost The Weeknd an estimated $7,000,000 USD ($9m AUD on current exchange rates) to create that Super Bowl Half Time Show full of bandaged people.

However, that use of an iPhone like a child looking through a store for their parent was priceless.

I wonder how The Weeknd Day went down with oblivious people in Toronto

For context:

“Hey Buddy, did you know today is Weeknd Day?”

“Of course it’s the weekend day, it’s Sunday.”

Major announcement: There will be a SPECIAL EDITION Manning Bowls report this week

In the spirit of the times, and being as incorrect as possible, Half Price has organised..

THE COVID CUP.

It’ll serve as a welcome back to social bowls at Manning Memorial after an interrupted start to the year for us Perthians, and to give teams chance to shake off any rust before the Jack Attack competition officially starts on February 17, and runs until March 24.

So, keep your eyes peeled on Thursday, because there’s going to be details like who gets the award for the best individual facemask, an award for any team who wears a coordinated set of facemasks, and unimportant things like the actual event of who gets the greatest shot variance and wins the Cup.

So King Edward of Broadmeadows has abdicated his throne

The signs were there for Eddie McGuire to step down sooner rather than later…. The scorn from last week’s press conference, the pile-up of all the 23 years worth of gaffs, and those Collingwood members marching down Collins Street the other day were nothing short of fierce in their criticism:

A con of Eddie’s resignation

HE CAN COMMENTATE COLLINGWOOD GAMES AGAIN

The ILLAWARRA Hawks are back in business

Now, I don’t like to speak Illawarra, but it was shocked – I mean how much can a koala bear?

Another ironically named horse in Australia

You’d think a horse like NEVER SECOND would live up to her name and win a race or finish 3rd, but as you can probably guess….

SHE RAN 2ND IN RACE 5 AT HAWKESBURY

In the time it took me to edit this part of the Tithbits, Ash Barty won her 1st Round match.

A double bagel with Vegemite, please:

That Daily Telegraph report about Adam O’Brien’s pissed-up fight at the Newcastle races is a special kind of special

And by that I mean how the hell did any self-respecting editor allow it to go to print, because at no point in the 30+ sentences do you understand what the hell Paul Kent is talking about…. Other than Adam being a publican’s son:

You would have to take short money to land the bet that, of all the NRL coaches to be involved in a stink at the races, the culprit would be a publican’s son.

Newcastle Knights coach Adam O’Brien grew up in his old man’s pub on the south coast, the Bayview Hotel at Batemans Bay, where he got close enough, often enough, to men behaving badly that he knows what it looks like and, as equally important, how to avoid it.

That’s the trick the good publicans don’t tell the bad ones, a little subtlety that is also often missed by security guards before they graduate from Charm School.

The good ones like Mick O’Brien could always escort a troublesome drunk out the door while making them believe it was their idea to flee the joint.

It is a profitable part of the pub game.

So, also, is knowing when a line has been crossed. Mick O’Brien always knew when that point had come, too.

His young bloke Adam put himself into the storyline of the soap opera that is rugby league when it went around on Monday that an unnamed coach was involved in a bathroom scuffle at the races a couple of Saturdays ago.

The version that was trotted around belonged entirely to the security guard involved, with O’Brien going down 40-0.

It went that a man accidentally bumped into O’Brien who, because he had lost on the punt and had had too many beers, began screaming obscenities at the patron and wanted to put on a stink, even after he had apologised.

According to the security guard O’Brien even demanded, “Don’t you know who I am?”, a charge impossible to recover from.

Not a line commonly heard in pubs, mind you, but there it was.

The incident quickly sparked the usual conspiracy theories.

Firstly that the Knights were sweeping it under their ever-bulging rug, another incident at a club in free fall.

The thought then progressed to why coaches aren’t subject to the same rules of behaviour as players, who could be subject to an NRL investigation.

The answer to that is they are.

The Knights reject any claim of a cover-up, saying they merely thought so little of the incident they did not believe it was one worth reporting.

Like usually happens, though, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

Knights sources say O’Brien has heavily denied demanding: “Don’t you know who I am?”

Also, the scuffle got only as physical as the initial incident at the door, nothing like what was being said on that fountain of truth, social media.

O’Brien has admitted fronting the bloke. That’s when the security guard walked in.

Still, O’Brien has to live with the half-truth version.

O’Brien was in an upstairs room when the Newcastle meeting got abandoned because of poor visibility.

It was a mercy ruling for most, happy to get out while they still had cab fare home.

Along with his several other Knights staff, O’Brien moved downstairs to another bar and stopped for one more on the way through.

Later, O’Brien was leaving the bathroom when he opened the door and stepped back to let in a couple of blokes coming the other way. Even though the Newcastle meeting was abandoned, they were still racing around the country and so, as usual, one direction is always in more of a hurry than the other at the races.

As the man whacked him in the belly on the way through and O’Brien stepped back with a choice to make.

Was it an accident? Was it meant to be a friendly how-you-going to the Knights coach?

It’s hard to tell.

If O’Brien had been an anonymous drinker at a Batemans Bay hotel there would have been only one reaction but then, if that were the case, would he have got whacked in the first place?

It is worth noting that this was not the first encounter the Knights had with the man.

Half an hour earlier, assistant coach Willie Peters headed to the tote to place a bet and was met with the timely classic, from the same bloke, “Who the f… are you?”

If he didn’t know he wouldn’t have asked, but such is the logic of the drunk punter.

Peters said nothing but remembered the face.

When O’Brien left the bathroom he grabbed Peters and the rest of his crew and told them they were gone.

As they walked out a woman stopped O’Brien for a photo.

“I don’t give a f … who you are,” yelled the man from the side.

When did Paul Kent turn into Archie Butterfly?

This is STILL what peak performance looks like

I reckon you could photoshop my head onto 2000 Tom Brady and you’d be unable to tell the difference in physique.

I saw someone accidentally write Astra Sharma as ‘Asthma Sharma’

Well, she did lose from a set up, so she probably does have trouble breathing.

Can I just say I’m thoroughly enjoying the linesperson-free aspect of the Australian Open

I mean sure, you’re cutting off quite a few people from fortnightly jobs, but matches seem to flow so much more freely without the stoppages for a Challenge, and it looks utterly hilarious when players get so shitty about an automatic line call that they start arguing with what is, quite literally, a stationary piece of technology….

And they eventually realise how dumb it looks and give up.

So in the wake of the Big Bash season coming to an end, Cricket Australia are still acting like tight-arses about DRS in the Big Bash

From the news.com.au article by Nic Savage:

A cluster of umpiring howlers dominated headlines in late December, with fans and pundits pleading for the DRS to be introduced sooner rather than later.

But the seven-figure cost of having the technology available for all 61 BBL matches has understandably prevented Cricket Australia from approving the move.

A few short paragraphs down:

“In international cricket, the DRS is there to try and almost get 100 per cent of decisions 100 per cent correct,” (Alistair) Dobson told news.com.au.

“That’s probably not what we’re trying to necessarily achieve with the BBL.”

“It’s going to be more about trying to find ways to remove the occasional, very clear error.”

“If we were to bring something in, it needs to be very BBL at their core.”

“What matches the BBL DNA? Minimal disruption, and make sure it’s fun and entertaining for people to engage with.”

MINIMAL DISRUPTION YOU SAY – SO WHY’D YOU BRING IN A 10 OVER TIMEOUT FOR BOTH INNINGS, WHICH HELPS PUSH GAME TIMES OUT BEYOND 3 AND A HALF HOURS, APPEASING YOUR DARK MASTERS HOLDING THE TV RIGHTS.

And something “very BBL at their core”…

I’d imagine it’d be a 3rd Umpire who couldn’t overturn the most basic LBW going down leg side.

For god’s sake, if Cricket Australia just said “We won’t bring in the DRS for the Big Bash because we’re total tightarses who don’t want to spend a cent more than we have to on a glorified club cricket competition”, I’d be more than happy to agree with them for publicly admitting the truth.