don't you need some doggy to love

Couple of further follow-up observations on old blog posts - firstly, continuing the 2016 theme of celebrity deaths I note the demise of Paul Kantner, songwriter, singer and guitarist with Jefferson Airplane, and, subsequently, Jefferson Starship. It should be noted that he'd quit the band before they mutated, unforgivably, into Starship. Kantner seems, endearingly, to have remained committed to his early counter-culture ideals and sticking it to The Man in general into his 70s. Here's the Airplane rattling through Volunteers at Woodstock in 1969.

Secondly, what is it with Australian rugby league stars and inappropriate sex acts with dogs? You'll recall the strange case of Joel Monaghan and his ill-advised dalliance with a golden labrador in 2010 - well the latest drink-fuelled atrocity is Mitchell Pearce's equally ill-advised drunken dry-humping of a small poodle-like creature at an Australia Day party, captured by an unnamed third party on video and now, inevitably, all over the internet. As boneheaded as this is I'm not sure it compares with Monaghan's exploits, since as far as I can see at no point does Pearce's penis directly contact, still less enter, any part of the dog. If I were him I'd be more embarrassed, in hindsight, at my blatant lack of shame or concern about what appears to be a large piss-stain on the front of my shorts. It is alleged he'd pissed on the sofa as well.

Interestingly, Mitchell Pearce was also involved in one of the most legendary of all pissed-up Aussie rugby league rampages, Craig Gower's terrorising of a golf resort in 2005 - it was he, aged about 16, who was chased "in a threatening manner" by Gower and subsequently vomited on. Maybe that incident made more of an impression than he realised at the time.