Halloween Cometh...

That classic Kiwi tradition – Halloween – is just around the corner and that’s usually the cue for a mega piss up with your mates. Sometimes that even involves getting in costume for the night and in case you were dead set devoid of ideas we’ve rustled up a few that should cut it on the night and a few that probably won’t…..

Superheroes – always a crowd pleaser.





Pulp Culture – movies & comics, the classic geek look.





Freaks & Geeks – there’s freaky and there’s naughty, sometimes you can even pull off the much desired ‘freaky naughty’ look. But it’s a fine line between success and failure with this one.





Goth – No explanation required.




Risqué – There’s nothing quite like being anatomically correct.




Just Plain Wrong..






Just Plain Right..



Full Retard – no one ever won an award for going full retard. Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rainman, look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic. Sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump. Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and he won a ping-pong competition? That ain’t retarded. But this guy has gone too far…

What Price Life?

If you’ve been following the Nia Glassie murder / manslaughter trial then you’ve probably already heard several good reasons as to why we should have the death penalty in this country. If you’re one of those limp dicked individuals who doesn’t care about stuff like this because it hasn’t happened to you, then lets recap:

The three grown men charged with her murder:

• Would regularly punch, kick and generally assault the three year old.

• Used her for wrestling practice, body slamming and jumping on her.

• Would hold her up to the ceiling by an appendage and drop her.

• Hung her from a clothesline and spun it until she fell off.

• Put her in a tumble dryer until she bled.

If you’re not remotely sickened by anything I’ve listed above then you have a lot more in common with these scrotes than I. Let’s make no bones about it, this was not your ‘accidentally tripped into the door’ type of family violence, this was sadistic fucked up shit dished out by animals with absolutely no place in our society.

See I believe that if you choose to step out of the boundaries that society deems acceptable then you cease to belong to society. These three, along with the fourth charged with manslaughter and the mother who did nothing, also charged with manslaughter; do not belong in our society. We don’t want them or their offspring – heaven forbid we give them the chance to father offspring.

Sure everyone makes mistakes; everyone’s nicked something from the corner diary or stolen milk from a letterbox. I got caught shoplifting at Foodtown when I was at College, the in store detective caught me with a fistful of TV Hits magazines down my baggy jeans. Well actually they were Coops jeans, the fact they were ten times too big just meant I could conceal heaps more stuff in them.

I was disappointed at myself for being caught, mostly because I had picked the guy for being an in store detective but I figured if he didn’t actually see me pocket the goods he couldn’t hit me up for them. But I figured wrong. Luckily the Cop who took me down to the station didn’t look in the backpack I was wearing because it was full of stolen merchandise, thanks mainly to my partner in crime them days. Sam Momeny, the Iranian boy who would’ve had a hot younger sister if it wasn’t for the fact that she had to start shaving the mo a few years before he did.

Luckily when the Cop dropped me home no one was home for him to tell. A few weeks later I had a distinctly bad feeling about a brown enveloped letter that arrived addressed to my parents. I opened it before they got home and luckily it was a note from the Five-0 detailing my misdemeanour. They never found out in the end but getting a two year trespass from the place where most of my mates worked pretty much ended my life of crime. Like most people I grew up and started to value things in life. These wankers don’t even value life itself.

What’s the worst that can happen to these pricks? Well hopefully they get theirs in prison but failing that what’s the harshest thing our justice system can dish out on them? Fuck all, that’s what. These guys will be back on the street in 10 years time and lets hope breaking straight into the living rooms in the dead of night of those civil libertarians who oppose the death penalty because they believe that sub humans like these three can be rehabilitated.

I think it’s time to start sending the message to guys like these three and Liam Reid, the spectacularly tattooed fuckwit who is on trail for the rape and murder of a deaf woman who probably never ever sensed him until it was too late, that their actions will not pass without consequence anymore. Reid would go on to rape another woman nine days later and despite overwhelming DNA evidence denies both. But then he would because he believes in his own mind that he is beyond reproach, that he’s done nothing wrong, that he not bound by societies rules.

Let’s do the world a favour as far as guys like Reid are concerned and when the guilty verdict is handed down – and it will be – let’s not even bother about anything else but taking them out the back of the courthouse and putting a bullet in their head.

I for one am happy to pull the trigger.

The Blue Thunder Root

Now, I love my wife, but if she were to up and tell me one day that we would be spending some family time standing around the local roundabout waving placards with her name on it just so she could get elected to parliament like the local National candidate did this past weekend, then I suspect Mr Jug Cord would have to pay a visit.

There are just some places you don’t expect to see advertising hoardings and a manic roundabout is just one of those places. How many votes is she going to get by distracting people there anyway? She might get the odd pity vote given that she has wheeled out everyone in the immediate family even dear old Dad who had to prop himself against the ‘Remember to Indicate’ sign, but I think, on the whole, no one is going to give a flying fuck.

KFC have learnt that lesson. Their six foot ‘Now Hiring’ window erection has failed to attract the ‘eligible for the minimum wage’ audience it targeted. Granted it’s big and bright enough for the text generation to see it, but they’re too busy texting whilst navigating the roundabout to see it.

My neighbour’s son is just such a genius. He starts his rotary turbo up several hours before he plans to depart and leaves it rumbling in the garage whilst he nips back in to have a quick jimmy over how sweet it sounds. I had a mate who used to do the same thing with his motorbike. He reckoned the manufacturers recommended it. Fuck me it does.

Now it’s not like we're talking about Granddad’s old black and white telly that actually needed half an hour for the cathode ray tube to warm up before you actually saw anything; no a motorbike or car for that matter is a highly engineered piece of kit – it’s made to go as soon as you turn the fricken key. Quite frankly if the guy who was selling me a motorbike told me it needed half an hour warm up time then alarm bells would be ringing my friend.

Did you see the doco on Mechaphilia the other night? Fantastic stuff. Mechaphilia is the sexual attraction to machines. There are only 12 known sufferers in the world, or at least bold enough to admit publicly that they like sticking their willy up the exhaust pipe of their motor. Not that there seems to be much suffering going on either, it looked like they were quite enjoying it given the blurred out images that these guys post on the world wide intraweb every day.

The programme focused mainly on one guy in The States (where else aye?) who likes to jizz all over his 1970s VW Beetle, or any car for that matter. His claim to fame was that he had given the original Blue Thunder helicopter a quick shafting the day he was left alone with it on a sightseeing trip. Unfortunately the Blue Thunder chopper no longer exists as it crashed in the early nineties, quite possibly because the avionics were filled with mans milk, who knows? Needless to say it was only a matter of hours before the British film crew had footage of him whacking one out over their four wheel drive.

Perhaps as a wind up they took this guy to a huge car show to gauge his reaction, needless to say he cracked one the whole time and proceeded to perform some pretty heavy frottage on anything with four wheels. How his old corduroys contained his excitement I’ll never know but it was certainly there on show for all to see.

I suspect my neighbour is a closet Mechaphiliac. In fact most boy racers would have to be wouldn’t they? Deep down I can imagine they’d all like to jam the ‘ol chopper between the seats and lube their ride. Both my neighbours – mother and son – like to toot as they leave, every farken time and they come and go and they come and go a lot. Perhaps it’s a signal that they have infact left. Perhaps they don’t actually talk to each other and thus communication is by car horn only. Perhaps it’s a sign that the streaming porn can start and / or the Mechaphilia postings can begin?

Perhaps they’re just annoying bastards.

How To Win An Election.

You know summer is well and truly around the corner when masses of nubile young women take to the streets in the early evening, running, whilst wearing very little. Consequently its around this time that the reported instances of young male drivers having accidents due to "sun strike" skyrockets. Now I've heard firm, perky nungas called a lot of things in my time but 'sun strike' is a new one on me too.

Not that all the running eye candy on show at this time of year is solely for the benefit of the heterosexual man. I passed a particularly buff individual who was so cut I was tempted to pull over and offer him the box of plasters form the medical kit in the boot. He was running with his top off, not because it was hot enough too, just because he could. See running at this time of year is not so much about getting fit as it is 'me me me, look the fuck at me'!

It's also about now that we non runners dust of the barbecue and begin the enjoyable task of chiselling off the crud that has been caked on the hot plate since the last time we used it. We did ours on the weekend, although admittedly Mrs ClubDes did ours - I was out running with my top off.

We had some friends over and talk eventually turned to politics like it does in election year, the only time anyone in this country talk’s politics. Even then the discussion was decidedly un-political in that we focused on personality, not policy. Why is it that here in NZ we are more concerned with who is coaching the All Blacks than whom is running the country?

National seem destined to win and would have to do something monumentally stupid to fuck it up. Still this is politics, there's plenty of time for that to happen. They all have that smug bastard look about them and have even started talking about life after they've won the election. Now if there's one thing I hate it's a poor winner.

Now I'm not advocating one party over another - I lament the fact that we are remarkably devoid of plausible political alternatives in this country - but I hate the thought of one pack of wankers inheriting a victory that they never really earnt simply because they're offering the biggest bribe. Is 'who's going to give me the best tax cut' really a responsible way to choose your next government?!

One of my social study teachers ran a class election back in my college days. Isn't it weird how all the male social study teachers were strangely effeminate? On recollection all of ours were real pink jersey wearing types and my god did we roast them for it. None of them ever had any control over the class and Bruiser and I would take to playing games like who could call out the rudest word without getting caught, or the natural progression from that game, who could summon the teach with the rudest name. The art of it was to be just loud enough for him to know that you were calling him yet at the same time stifling the delivery just enough to muffle the fact that you had just called him 'greatbighardcock'.

Anyhoo, the whole class election thing really kicked off. I led the B'Stard Party, so named after a Rik Mayall character on TV at the time. Seeing as how I had the biggest chopper I naturally had all the lads behind me. Or it could have been that our campaign was built on the promise that we'd take the party logo stickers off the pink bits of the Penthouse centrefolds that doubled as our party posters. Yeah it might've been that. We campaigned for shorter skirts on the girls and longer lunchtimes, you know, standard stuff. The girls had split into two cliques and as is always the case when that happens with sheilas, shit started getting personal.

After an initial ballot we boys just about had the numbers to rule alone, but not quite. The bigger of the girls cliques, lead by the chick with the biggest mouth funnily enough, were a close second, close enough to rule out the other clique. Because neither side had enough to rule outright we had another ballot, one that 'ol bigmouth thought she'd win easily because the girls would side with her in a show of vaginal solidarity.

Only she thought wrong. Her slagging off the other clique came back to haunt her and she went down in flames and being the graceful loser she was - this was the same girl that would fake debilitating injuries in the final stage of every 100 meter race she wasn't winning on every athletics day - packed a sook and never spoke to me again.

The irony is that same girl tried to add me as a friend on Facebook the other day. My response? Delete! Oh and we removed the party logo stickers too. What can I say? We were a political party that stuck by its pre election promises....

What's In A Name?

All my life I’ve had people mis-spell or generally stuff up my last name in one way or another. My last name is not common, but then nor is it a breakaway Russian state either; it’s just not one you see every day.

It’s still English mind you. It wasn’t like I was one of those Asian kids who’s last name was infact their first name which never got used anyway, so you called them by their middle name which also turned out to be the province they were from. Nor is it like my Tokelauan mate Dan, whose father’s English name came about after he originally came over here for a rugby trip and never went home. He and the rest of the team spread out all over the Manawatu – so as to avoid detection from the immigration authorities - and called themselves whatever town they were living in. Thus his last name is Levin.

Teachers at school were forever fucking up my last name. Funny how it was not cool for them to be pulled up on their poor comprehension of the written word, but if it was me stuffing up my reading then the whole friggen class got to hear about it. Most of the time I think they did it on purpose just to piss me off. It’s all part of that mental war game that teachers like to play from the moment you walk in the room. It starts with name calling and ends with rhetorical questions that you answer. Before you know it you’re outside the principal’s office for half a day. True story. Who knows at age 13 what the fuck a rhetorical question is anyway?

But most of the time I put it down to lazy eye syndrome, which is not the same as ‘glad eye’ which is what the poo chick at work gives you across the room after a few wines on a Friday night. It’s like when that same poo chick sends you that spam email that has all the adjoining words taken out of it, but yet somehow your brain can still read it. Only in my case it was bored shitless teachers reading an N when it should have been a W. I took to writing it in bold most of the time, and several sizes bigger than the rest of my surname just so they would get it right. I think in all fairness it just egged the fuckers on.

Still they’re not as bad as the fat bugger on the plane who came up to me one time because he had spotted my name in big letters across the back of the football top I was wearing. He asked if my name was spelt with an N because his was. He showed me his boarding pass and he was not wrong I tell you, his name was spelt with a N. Pity mine wasn’t.

But by College I was well use to having an identity crisis regarding my name. Back when I was about ten I used to go and stay with my father in Tauranga. Incidentally it was his family name that would later give me all the grief in life. I should’ve seen the writing on the wall when not long after this story took place he pissed of to the other side of the world never to be seen or heard from again. Nice one Dad, you tit.

I used to introduce myself to the neighbourhood kids as some other Christian name, because mine was never quite cool enough. Imagine their surprise when they’d knock on the same door I disappeared into at the end of each day and ask my Dad if ‘Steve’, ‘Dave’ or ‘Ian’ was home, only for him to tell them to piss off as there was no one living there by that name.

It all came to a head the day they spotted me behind him. I rolled my eyes at Dad as if to say ‘these guys are on crack or summit, why else would they be asking for someone you’ve never heard of?’ When he looked away I rolled my eyes at them as if to say ‘My Dad is on crack or summit, why else would he not know his own sons name?’. I think I nearly pulled it off. I diffused the situation on my way out the door by telling them they had to call me by my real name which was fucken news to them because they thought I was somebody else anyway!

When I eventually got married I hyphenated my name because it seemed the metro sexual thing to do. After all I thought it was only fair given that my wife and son were doing theirs so I would do mine. Now you’d think three distinct names separated by a space and a hyphen would make things easier, but no. Now I get called my wife’s family name, even by people who have an email from me which has been clearly signed ‘Des’. Don’t even try saying a hyphen name on the phone because the people on the other end are not really listening at the best of times.

Hyphenating your name used to be the sole domain of the poofy upper class, but now it’s the done thing by an insecure society that has devalued the institute of marriage. It’s a father’s way of saying ‘my seed must carry forth’ and it’s a mother’s way of saying ‘I have a steel vagina’. No wonder our kids are growing up without a sense of identity, we don’t even give them that luxury when naming them anymore. My son’s soccer team this year was made up of several hyphenates, of which he was one obviously, but that’s a sign of the times.

One of the fathers who consistently got my name wrong was a hyphen himself. Now that is just taking the piss.