Some hilarious situations occurred at the first LOC Melbourne conference. But the moment that still LOL's me to death happened at the beginning of the night at Bimbos in Fitzroy. The only three surviving members of LOC got there early and set up camp in the round room in order to get a quick pizza. This room has many names. The igloo, the extreme room, the pizza oven, the redrum room, the murder room, the crazy room, the room of death, the secret room and the room of no secrets. It could fit any one of these descriptions on any different night. The gist of it is that it's small and round with a curved round ceiling, a bench seat that goes the whole way around and a big coffee table that fills the middle. It gives you the feeling of either being in a cave or sitting in a pizza oven. It's special feature is that if one person whispers to their neighbour, the 'whisper' whispers itself all the way around the camel/wall/ceiling and then at some point during this journey gets converted into an almost 'shout', directly into the ear of someone on the other side of the room. Obviously this tends to lend itself to both awkward and funny situations. For example, one time two guys came into the room and were attempting to hit on these two girls (our friends). Basically, one of the girls whispered to her friend that these guys are munts and the guys immediately heard it loud and clear and left.

The great thing about the room is that people are constantly wanting to join you in there and if you have a good crew you can be selective about who you allow to enter. LOC wasn't quite big enough to be selective about the applicants so we let in the first people who came along. Whilst shooting the bull with our new friends the following happens:

-Lemon leaves for the bar and comes back looking all distraught. Apparently he has practically been molestered at the bar by some crazed female who has just earlier been disallowed entry into a winery (it's now only about 7pm).

-30 minutes later, after a few Bimbo $4 pizzas, Lemon exits agian, for a waz this time, and this blonde broad runs into the room, Benson cries "Willow!" and Willow throws herself at Benson and I'm thinking wow it's a small world, Benson's only been in Melbourne for a day and he's already bumping into people.

-Lemon re-enters room with empty bladder, sees Willow and then she jumps on him too. I'm wondering who is this girl? She knows everyone? Then I realise that Willow and the winery girl are one and the same and she must have also attacked Benson in one of his excursions out of the room too, but on a separate occasion to her attack on Lemon. It's not safe out there, or in here.

-Next, Willow's friend, who has the facial appearance of a cute cartoon fieldmouse, enters the room, eyes up my brand new Brixton pimp hat (direct from the US&A), and starts clawing me to get her hands on it. And I'm thinking these girls are wild.

-Mouse runs off with my hat and then Willow jumps on the table in front of us and starts giving an impromptu dance and describes her particular move as "the horseshoe." She had many variations of the horseshoe, the left horseshoe, the right horseshoe etc. When I asked if she could do the reverse horseshoe - "Of course!" and she happily complied. All the horseshoes looked pretty much the same, but maybe they went in different directions. From where we we're sitting, practically beneath her, all the horseshoes looked the same.

-Mouse re-enters, luckily still wearing my Brixton hat, grabs Benson's camera, gets down on her hands and knees and starts taking photos of Willow's horseshoe. I'm thinking man does this girl takes some liberties.

-Now we realise that Willow really was some sort of entertainer. She stopped dancing and started telling a story which required a lot of animated body actions. At one point her animated story telling got so extreme that she jumped on the seat, lost her balance and fell towards Lemon, thus knocking his glass to the floor, and then she crashes down onto floor covered in broken glass.

-We were all shocked and knelt down to see if she was ok. But Willow wasn't worried about the possibility of injury. All she was worried about was finishing her story. She picked herself half off the ground, and whilst still on her knees with blood oozing out of her hands and arms, immediately re-started telling the story from where she had left off, that's how dedicated she was to the stories punch line.

-When Willow had finished we helped her on to her feet and tried to help clean out the shards of Lemon's glass that were sticking out. However, she wasn't interested in this, she was more interested in getting into another story. She really was an entertainer extraordinaire. Later she claimed to have spawned from the Camberra, ACT, which she claimed stood for Awesome, Caring and Terrific, brilliant.

-Soon after, LOC had a quick pow wow and decided that we really had to leave if we were going to make our next rendezvous at bar 161 on Chapel Street, plus these girls were too dangerous. Before we could leave I really needed to make sure I get my hat out of the building, but every time I grabbed at it Mouse actually tried to fight me. When I made up a story about how it had sentimental value to me and it was a gift from my mother she told me not to be a tight arse and that it was hers. I'm thinking - flammin galahs, this sheila's insane.

-So, there the three of us are, standing outside the entrance of the extreme room which happened to have these velvets ropes on metal poles sealing off it's entrance from one side. It almost looked as if the velvet ropes were sometimes used to control the crowds of people trying to get into the round room. We wanted to leave, but I was still waiting for another visual of mouse so I could grab my hat and run.

-Mouse appeared. I did a fake lunge with my left hand for the hat and she quickly ducked right, but not anticipating my lunges fakeness, or my actual right handedness, ducked straight into my right arms reach. I grabbed the hat, her eyes raged, her claws came out, she snarled and lunged at my eyes. The hat had become a Gollum-ring like obsession to her, it was her preeeeecioous. The hat had become my Indiana Jones hat (it even looks a little like Indy's hat) and I wasn't going to leave it in the round room temple of doom.

-Realising it was my only chance of escape, but with people blocking all of my exits, I put the Indy hat on, thus immediately triggering the Indy theme song in my head, I whirled around and stepped back towards the round room, the place where the whole mess began. Unfortunately I didn't notice the line of velvet ropes blocking my path, they we're only about crotch height after all, and there were a lot of people around. At the same time as feeling the velvet rope gather round me, I also felt the air whooshing around my neck from the slashing claws of the mouse. In utter desperation I continued my stride thus collecting a string of poles and velvet ropes around my waist.

-The dark round room now seemed to be inhibited entirely by large people and I had to jump over a fat sitting near the entrance, his stomach almost blocking it. Leaving a pile of velvet ropes at my feet I scuttled over the coffee table. I felt her claws digging deep into my back and start to scramble up my neck towards the hat. In the nick of time I was able to grab it off my head.

-As I raised the hat above my head towards the roof, she dived for the ceiling but fell inches short and plummeted to the floor. I could still hear the Indy theme song playing as this happened. Sensing my only chance of escape and seeing Benson and Lemon both stooping over with laughter, I quickly rejoined them outside the room and we all bee lined towards the exit of the bar. As we slipped through the packed dance floor, Amazonian Indians wearing loincloths appeared everywhere and blew poisonous darts at us from pipes held to their mouths.

-After scrambling through the crowd we had to quickly compose ourselves before we walked past the security men at the door, I have witnessed that some of these Bimbo's bouncers have screws lose and belong in prison. We didn't want to arouse any suspicion.

-As soon as our feet were finally planted on Brunswick Road we all had a quick glance at each other, then, without talking, we all instantly put our heads down and started sprinting down the sidewalk and away to safety.

So much for a quick pizza.

As well as the important business mentioned above, it was also decided at the 2008 conference that Benson, after completely failing LOC NZ, is to be transferred to LOC Melbourne and that he has to contribute one new "P Wagon convertible" to the cause. Benson now drives the fabulous LOC convertible, but can only now afford to sleep in a swag (an Australian tent).