Stupid Is As Stupid Does

So I’ve decided that I’m going to watch the new series of 'The Hills' that starts on MTV in a week or so.

Admittedly this type of show goes against all that I stand against – the making of celebrities out of nobodies, popularising the typical sex sells stereotypes and creating an unrealistic expectation of life that the majority of young girls will aspire too but ultimately can never realistic attain – and fuck I’m still undecided if it’s even real, but it’s a free perv and I’m always up for that.

I’ve only ever seen about 20 minutes in total of the thing. It’s one of those shows that my wife is not so keen on so that means we don’t watch it. Funny how compromise in a marriage often means ‘let’s watch what I don’t dislike’ rather than ‘let’s watch something we both like’. After having to sit through half an hour of yet another game show with that freak of nature Jason Gunn I’ve decided to put my foot down and have decided we will be – at the very least – taping The Hills this season.

Jason Gunn reminds me of a time when you got K bars from the dairy for 10 cents, double happies weren’t illegal and occasionally you still stuck your willy up the bath tap just to see what it felt like. The problem now is that Jason Gunn still thinks and acts like his audience is 10 years old and that the person standing next to him is actually a puppet with a penis for a nose called, rather appropriately, ‘Thingee’. The only marginally funny thing Jason Gunn has ever done – and only then because he needed the money I suspect - was regularly appear on a NZ skit show in a reoccurring segment called ‘Jasons Tinnie House’. The irony is that some people actually believe Jason Gunn is ‘clearly on something’ and always has been.

I used to think parking a car was a relatively straightforward exercise that most people had mastered, until I spent the grand total of 30 days, several stories up, overlooking one of the busiest car parks in Wellington. Surprisingly I never got bored at watching just how much of a dogs breakfast some people made of it and we’re not talking about parallel parking here, this is your straight in and out job – the missionary position of parking – where unfortunately, unlike sexy time, not every hole is a goal. I am now convinced that driving tests should start with the ability to park and if the driver doesn’t get it right first time then no license for them, one year!

Fuck ups, whether an action or an individual, are not confined to the roads though. Going out to sea in a 6 foot wooden dinghy with no life jackets, motor or sense is right up there with the top ten decisions that changed the world isn’t it? Two good old boys seemed rather surprised when featured on the news this week to admit that they weren’t expecting the change in conditions when they set out to sea in Napier the other day. There seems to be a lot of that surprise when other guys like these are rescued too. Do you think they get walking down to the local dairy in their wife beater and stubbies mixed up with putting themselves at the mercy of mother nature or what?! I wonder if being landed with a $50,000 bill for the cost of the search and rescue operation that gets mounted for these numb nuts would make more of them wake the fuck up before they head out to sea?!

Not that stupidity at sea is confined to the Napier Chapter of the NZ Mensa club. Pete Bethune is the guy that’s mortgaged his house twice just so he could sail his suped up tri-maran jet boat around the world in record time, otherwise known as the Earthrace, a race of one incidentally. He mentioned at the completion of his race of one this week that “if you made a mistake out in the ocean, you’re dead”. Well you would be wouldn’t you; you’re in the middle of a vast expanse of ocean, that’s what its fucken there for!

The peasant fisherman they ran over and killed on the way to breaking the record ‘made a mistake out there’ alright, he chanced upon the same square metre of ocean that just happened to contain at that very same moment a high speed 78 foot wedge of Kevlar composite tri-maran. What are the odds of that happening aye? It might not have been the first thing to go through his mind that morning when he set out for a quiet fish but you can bet it was the last. Literally!

Now that he’s broken whatever obscure record he set out to break and won the race of one, Bethune now has to come home to a pile of debt and quite possibly the realisation that nobody really gives a shit about whatever record he just broke.

Maybe he should’ve just stayed indoors and watched The Hills.