Sex Doesn't Always Sell

I once wrote a scathing letter to a sports magazine I used to subscribe too. I had received my latest copy in the mail, had taken one look at the local C grade 'celebrity' on the cover clad in only a bikini and wondered - quite rightly too - what did this have to do with sport? Up till then, recent covers of the mag had been decidedly soft porn, so Eva the Vulgarian was the last straw as far as I was concerned.

I questioned the wisdom of having the magazine look no different to all the other soft core magazines bought by men who are too afraid to buy the mags in the plastic wrappers. Wouldn't it be better to have your magazine stand out on the news stand, rather than be lost in a see of airbrushed titties I asked? If you must stick with the theme I asked, why not have some of NZs champion sportswomen on the cover and promote a positive image of women?

To their credit the magazine printed my letter. The editors satirical reply hinged only on the premise that he suspected I was actually my wife, as both our names appear on our email. I guess he thought that no red blooded male would be complaining about a blonde in a string bikini. But he thought wrong.

To cut a long story short, the editor resigned a few months later (he now writes for a trashy Sunday paper). The new editor at the magazine changed the policy back to having actual sports people on the cover and the magazine seems to sell quite well these days. It is certainly a lot easier to find on the shelf. Proof then, that sex doesn't always sell.

Amusingly some IT magazines are yet to find that out though. Certainly nothing makes me more excited about my latest issue of Poindexter Monthly than a girl in a bikini holding a mother board on the cover.

See, I am a bit of an 'untypical' type of guy when it comes to things like this. But I don't believe I am the only one.

I enjoy rap music as much as the next frightened Caucasian, but the videos are absolutely disgusting. Not that this a phenomenon confined to rap music - soft core titillation is so mainstream these days that we've become numb to it. Yes, I realise that the women in the videos are paid for their time and do so by choice, but that doesn't make it right.

The ultimate irony to me is that rap 'musicians', who are predominantly Afro American, will rap lyrical about racial oppression and just how badly they're treated by the five-0, yet don't hesitate to promote women as being nothing more than possessions. What do their mothers think of all this I wonder?

How about the confused adolescent girl who gets her prompt on how she should act around boys from what she sees on MTV? What of the adolescent boy who does the same? How does he now expect to treat girls do you think? Skip forward down the chain of consequence with me a few steps - and now throw in the world wide web. Is it any wonder we have an ever increasing number of young girls exposing themselves (mentally and physically) online?

Parents should be playing a positive part in this type of scenario, but many don't. I especially applaud the mothers - and lets be honest here, it is the mother - who buys her 10 year old daughter the short skirt, knee high boots and padded bra combo. Allow me to offer some advice (it's free advice too): Your daughter is not a Barbie doll that you can dress provocatively in order to overcome your own self image anxieties! Just because you can't pull the outfit off, doesn't mean she should have to.

Now I don't necessarily believe there are more paedophiles around today than there were, say thirty years ago. Only now we make it more easier for the bastards to get their jollies by sexualising our kids - particularly our daughters.

So don't endorse anything that promotes the fallacy that soft porn is okay. Don't buy the crap the rappers record if their lyrics and videos continue to trash women. Don't buy the sports mag with the bikini on the front. Don't watch the incestuous programmes that portray life (and women) as being one big continuous shag. If enough people did, then the record company doesn't finance the crapper because his records don't sell. The sports mag returns to sports people on the front cover and the programme loses advertisers and eventually it's funding because no one is watching. It's that simple.

Most importantly, protect your kids. Sex doesn't always have to sell, not to your kids anyway. Don't dress your daughters like hookers. Clothes don't maketh the child, their innocence does.

Fast Food Nation?

My local KFC is looking to hire new staff.

I know this - not because I've been crimping with my homies again and got the low down - but because they've printed it in four foot high bright yellow lettering in their front window. A good piece of free advertising I suppose, but not the smartest move to pull outside the two busiest roundabouts in J Town. The locals live a charmed existence getting round the two of them as it is without The Colonel putting them off with his eight foot erection.

Incidentally - ever notice how The Colonel has mysteriously started to fade away on all the KFC signage and packaging? Oh he's still there - if you look close enough - but you really have to look. I'm not surprised though, the guy looks like a member of the KKK, only without the hood. He's even got a militaristic title. I guess 'Arch Deacon' was a little too much of a giveaway so they went with 'Colonel'. That, or he looks like a paedophile, which I've personally suspected for quite some time. Finger licken good anyone?

Anyhoo, the sign in the front window is nice and big and I guess it has to be when your target workforce is more akin to focusing on the tiny text of mobile phones. Either that or the urban myth about the 'something extra' in the coleslaw is actually true and the occupational hazard to that kind of carry on - as your mother always told you - is that you will eventually go blind. So best make the letters nice and big for all them adolescent boys who will have had plenty of practise by now aye?

I should point out at this point that I don't class every teenager as a stoner, for there are some incredibly bright kids out there, but it seems that the weaker link in their generation all work in fast food restaurants these days. There are however some hard working, thoughtful kids holding down these types of jobs too, so I exclude them also from my remaining unscientific generalisations.

KFC and all of the other fast food joints are on a real hiding to nothing these days. They've almost become the persona non grata of the eating world. Not that I'm distraught by this, because as a parent I have now come to see them as the kiddiefiddlers they all are (I'm still talking to you, Colonel!). They should be made by the Commerce Commission to remove the 'fast' from their advertising too, especially McDonalds who perversely, are now making all their burgers only as you order them. Not in advance, but while you wait. Kinda defeats the purpose of fast food doesn't it? But more on McDees later...

Once clean restaurants (and I lose that term loosely) are now no cleaner than picnic tables. When it's a struggle to get barely enough conscious staff to front the counter, you can bet you'll be cleaning your own table.

But it wasn't always this way. I remember as a child visiting places like KFC, Homestead Chicken, McDonalds etc and it was standing room only. Places staffed by a motivated, happy bunch of teenagers who were prepared to do whatever it took to make your experience a memorable one. Pay rates were even worse for teenagers back then, but these were places that gave opportunity and not just easy money. Working in a fast food place back then was a real teenage status symbol too. It didn't get much cooler than working at the Golden Tits.

I remember applying in person one Saturday for a handful of vacancies offered at the local McDees - there were so many kids my age there that had the Internet been around back then, I suspect it would have stopped that day because all the nerds were lining up together. I didn't get the job incidentally, possibly because my acne count was not as high as some around me that day.

It all changed in the early nineties though, when we started cottoning on to the fact that fatty food in large quantities would pretty much kill us. Thus we started to shy away from the hand that had fed us for so long.

Kentucky Fried Chicken - as it was known back then - decided to drop the 'fried' bit from it's name as a result. I actually met the guy who was in charge of KFC at that time and claims he was the brains behind the name drop. He was an inspiring man - one of those half is glass full types and when asked 'hows it going' would reply something along the lines of 'Brilliant' or 'Marvelous'. I've got a feeling he was also as bent as a row of tents though. Which is okay, if you like that sort of thing.

It wasn't long before all the established fast food joints started changing their menus, their advertising and their image. All in a desperate attempt to convince us that they had changed and that although they still cook everything in a bathtub full of fat - it was now good fat. We weren't buying it - literally.

McDonalds have even now introduced salads and rubbery pasta meals for kids too(ever wondered what happened to all the left over Happy Meal toys? They melt them down to make the pasta meals I reckon). None of it has worked though. The only thing that has gotten me back into a McDees after reading books like Fast Food Nation and watching Supersize Me, was the life size cutouts of Sarah Ulmer in her cycling gear. Alas, some bugger had beaten me to it though and had pinched the one from our local before I got the chance.

My advice to all the fast food companies in NZ like Restaurant Brands (who own KFC & Pizza Hut) is to forget fighting it, flaunt what you've got. People who want fatty fast food are still going to come through the door, because it's addictive. So don't pretend to be something you're not, go back to doing what you were best at.

Take all the money you put into feel good advertising and spend it on staff and improving the eating areas of your establishments. Don't worry about developing product ranges that don't match the rest of your menu. Let Subway sell subways - they're crap anyway and someone looking for a quarter pounder is not going to be happy with six inches. If it's worked for the local fish and chip shop for all these years - by far the busiest 'fast food' places any night of the week - it can work again for you.

Not McDonalds though. The anti-Christ of the fast food nation. My advice does not apply to you. For no other fast food company deliberately targets children like you bastards do. You have marketing strategies that begin with emotionally locking in children at the youngest possible age. It's a strategy that would make Adolf Eichmann proud. Don't know who he was? Google him, he had a master plan too.

True story - an employee of McDonalds was fired in the States because he couldn't in good conscience follow the marketing plan he was tasked with. What was his job at the company? He got to dress up as Ronald McDonald - the real paedophile in this story.

Never trust a clown, at least not one peddling a Happy Meal.

Hooked On P

We are in the grip of a P epidemic here in New Zealand. It’s gotten so bad that the main conduit of the P doesn’t even acknowledge that it’s pushing the stuff.

I am talking of course, about Porn. Oh we have a small thing with methamphetamine over here too but that’s far less interesting.

Here in New Zealand we have had (until recently) only the one telecommunication provider: Telecom. For a while, the man owned Telecom and ran a small profit doing what a Telco does best. It was a small time setup for a small time country. Those of us who grew up in rural NZ got to share the one phone line with all the other houses up and down the gravel road we all lived on. It was known as a ‘party line’, because sure enough, it was shared by many parties.

Back then no one really put down the phone when they said they were going to if they picked up mid conversation – the voyeur in us all often meant you tried to listen in for as long as you could without being noticed. The seeds of the P epidemic it seems, were sown long ago.

Of course a ‘party line’ today is not what it use to be. Now you pay for the pleasure of talking to a girl who you can bet looks nothing like her picture in the back of the magazine….

Anyhoo, then the man decided to sell his Telco to a bunch of foreign suits, who, recognising the potential for a spot of national sodomy, turned the business into a licence to print money. Because there was no competition, the prices and coincidentally, the profits kept going up and up. All the while the company portrayed itself as the good guy, by rolling out years of TV advertising that took images of cute & cuddly wildlife and paired it with feel good songs from the sixties.

No one really cared that their phone rental cost so much at that point. Those animals were so damn cute and those tunes so damn catchy. "How could a company like that be anything but be genuinely wanting to do it’s best for us?" we collectively thought.

Now the man has decided to rein in the foreign suits and has passed legislation requiring Telescum to share the infrastructure and more importantly, the wealth. For regular Kiwis, that has meant broadband – which was painfully slow under the one Telco - has now started to get a bit quicker, cheaper and therefore more accessible with several Telcos offering the service (We still lag like a dial up connection in comparison to the services and pricing plans of other developed countries however.)

And so began the epidemic. Most of our communities are small and it's almost impossible to exit the segregated adult section down at the local video shop without bumping into someone you know, so anything offering relatively free T & A is too good to ignore. Hence we've turned to the internet en masse and we’re now making up for lost time. New Zealand has one of the highest (per capita) Internet usage rates in the world and I reckon most of it has to be porn. What else is there to view on the net in such large quantities?

Teachers are doing it, public servants are doing it, lawyers, librarians – we know they are because they keep getting caught with it all on their work PCs. Personally, I’ve never understood the need to keep porn. There’s so much of it on tap, why keep the images? Unless it looks like someone you know. Or fancy.

So the latest bunch of Telescum TV ads no longer feature cute animals. They’re keeping it real this time, focusing on New Zealanders using quick broadband to 'get connected'. And they're getting connected alright, to Next Door Nikki. At the end of each ad is a real surprise for the ‘unscripted’ participant – favourite singer turns up, long lost family is on hand etc - just to remind us what a good bunch of jokers Telescum are at heart.

However, not one ad has portrayed what has to be the largest demographic of Telescums broadband users, the online porners. With so many of Telescums users undoubtedly surfing the good stuff, why not represent them in an ad? The numbers involved would even make those surfing online one handed, more than those who are not. So we’re talking about a majority here – that makes it mainstream by my definition! If it's mainstream, surely it's not taboo anymore?

And the surprise at the end could be that Next Door Nikki actually meets her online voyeur, the 35 year old married white male with the online profile of the 15 year old college boy. It's going to be surprises all round if that ad ever makes it to air.

Now that would make me sit up and watch. I might even pause the porn to do so.

A Rove By Any Other Name....

I hate to start things off with a character assassination - but this one's been overdue for quite some time...

Australian talk show host and cardigan wearer Rove McManus is not funny. Nor - on the whole - is his show. I've given it a lot of thought and I've done my research - forcing myself to sit through several episodes in the pursuit of fairness and thus ruling out the slim chance that I was 'catching him on a bad night'.

There are some amusing moments on his show, on occasion, but they usually don't involve Rove or any of his regular guests who like their host, are unfunny. Roves mate Pete (and I'm guessing this is how all the regulars got to be on the show, cause they're Roves mate) is decidedly unfunny. He is rotund and looks like he should be funny, but isn't. His biggest claim to fame is the voice over he looped through the annoying James Blunt song that just made it, well, more annoying. Pete gets a lot of camera time on Rove. Shame he's not funny.

So why is it that so many people think Rove is funny?

You see here in New Zealand we have a group of people who like to spend their time imitating our most populist creatures - sheep. This group of 'trendsetters' (a group predominantly made up of whats left of the Friends TV show fan base) like to have whatever is being marketed as the next big thing and thus buy / watch / follow it in such numbers that it does indeed become the days hottest property. Not by quality, but by sheer weight of numbers succumbing to its marketing.

Rove and his TV show is a big hit with this crowd. I suspect they download him onto their iPods so that they may watch it in between periods of listening to their favourite radio station, 91zm. A station that unashamedly promotes itself as being a big fan of Rove.
Which in itself would be okay, if their influence didn't force itself over into the mediums I enjoy - all of whom do their best to play it cool and act all independent but are so subconsciously scared of missing out on what ever threatens to collectively float the boat of this small country that they almost inevitably buy into the hype too.

No one has any balls over here anymore.

One man who made like he did for a wee while was a current affairs presenter by the name of John Campbell. Now I like John - he's a local lad, is quite funny at times and makes a good argument. Well he used too, when he was the heir apparent to the 7pm current affairs viewing audience crown and was fighting tooth and nail to get it. But now that he has his hands firmly on the jewels, his have almost disappeared, leaving a pale imitation of the street fighter that used to ask the hard questions of his guests. Those guests have been bumped from the lineup and their places taken by regular appearances on the Campbell Live show from the likes of - wait for it - Rove McManus.

The two have quite the affinity for other it would seem. John wishes he was as popular with the sheep as Rove appears to be. Rove likes John because 'there's no one in Australia like him' which to me lends itself to more questions than it does answers on just why Rove digs John so much.
The irony to all this is that once upon a time we Kiwis found nothing more annoying than an unfunny Australian. If that unfunny Australian was annoying too than that meant instant removal from the Christmas card list. Personally I think Rove's unfunniness makes him annoying, so he's off my list for this year.

So both men get the big channel change from me these days when their respective shows come on the telly. It is after all the simplest way to avoid the subject, but with so may sheep wanting to be in on the hype in this day and age, is it really that easy to escape the celebrity any more?

If enough sheep tell you you're 'soooooo funny', does it actually make you funny, even if you're not?

To all things, there is a beginning.

Where to start aye? Another IP address joins the worldwide intraweb blog phenomenon. To be honest, I've been a closet blogger for some time, I just never really knew it. I'm one of those 'letter to the newspaper' type of guys. I'm a pessimist to boot which pretty much means I have a negative opinion on just about everything and I feel people should know it. Seems like I was born to blog.

My only attempt at 'blogging' to date was briefly holding down a page on an online diary website some 10 - 12 years ago. Hardly world changing stuff, but back then it was the big thing. Problem was, I was making it all up! Why? To pretty much score girls, what else? My life was boring then and its borderline that now. To this day I remain convinced almost everyone else posting on that website was making it up too, only they were better at it than me.

It didn't work incidentally, I didn't score any girls. In hindsight, I think I can safely assume that out of the 100,000 users on that site, I was perhaps the only user that wasn't a middle aged man pretending to be a 14 year old girl.

Have you ever been to an internet dating site and noticed how most of the men who list themselves on the site never actually post a picture? I wonder why....

But rest assured, this is not a similar exercise. At 31 years of age, married to my beautiful wife and with a handsome, talented son in tow this is all about me venting the spleen. Expressing the same opinions that my poor wife has to endure every day. Maybe in blogging them I will get them out of the system and spare her the pleasure.

Yes, ClubDes has finally opened it's doors to the masses.