I Am The Punisher (Just Don't Tell Anyone).

One of my life long ambitions is to be a vigilante.

And by vigilante I don’t mean like a lentil growing, tofu eating, seldom bathing hippie that goes around poking holes in spy stations. What a bunch of winners those guys turned out to be. The irony is of course that they got off the charges which just reinforce my belief that this country is crying out for some vigilante justice.

Why someone hasn’t does this already is beyond me. Maybe not here in NZ but in some far off country where guns come in cereal boxes, like the States. There’s plenty of gun toting nut bars over there but yet none of them has identified the niche market that is the borderline psycho crime fighter.

I on the other hand, have always wanted to be one since the day I took the online ‘Which Marvel Character Are You?’ test. It was quite thorough and I was pleasantly stoked to find that at the end of it I was ‘The Punisher’. Stoked because not only is the Punisher too cool for school but he doesn’t wear a costume. Well, not really. The man is a spandex free zone.

Your standard hero is hard to mimic. There are just too many variables, manly reality, standing in your way. Sure, there’s a guy called ‘The Human Spider Man’ on account he free climbs some tall buildings but he doesn’t swing from them on account of his ability to shoot webbing from some mysterious area above his wrist, so he just doesn’t cut it.

But then there’s guys like the Punisher, or girls like Elektra, who, if we were going to be fan boy honest, does have ‘powers’ but it’s not those that we fan boys get a woodie over...

The best thing about being a bad ass vigilante is I don’t think the cops would bother with you. Oh sure, they’d make like they were but if you started knocking off gang bangers, p heads, kiddie fiddlers and douche bags that throw full beer bottles at elderly women out walking, then you’d be doing them and society a favour.

Now I have a few mates in the Five-O, like Coops and when I start cleaning up the streets I’ll be leaning on them for some Intel. They’ll be my insiders. They’ll put two and two together of course and realise it’s me doing the business but it’ll be like Commissioner Gordon and Batman; an ask no questions homo erotic relationship.

I’ll need some hardware of course but I’ve got that covered too; DG Macca has some pistolas so he’ll be my weapons expert. He and I also managed to smuggle back a small arsenal from our time in Nam and so what he can’t get me I can machine with my bare hands, in Bruiser's garage, which is good because that shit can’t be traced.

I’ll need some wheels and although the passion wagon is built for speed its sparse interior, lack of airbags and side impact beams doesn’t make for a ramrod of a ride. It’s also white, which as we all know, is the colour of surrender. I’m torn then, between pinching the father-in-laws big fuck off shiny Merc, or beating up the wife’s car and painting it as black as a black man’s cape.

Finally I need a look and I was going to go for the whole Punisher thing because the white skull on black is classic ‘don’t fuck with me’. Just like a pirate. But then I saw one of the geekiest poindexters I know buying one before me at Armageddon and I may not be exactly super hero physique, but this guy has no damn right to be wearing one. The tit.

So I guess I’ll be pulling on the mantard and doing an Elektra. Ah well.

I make this shit look good. Real good.

Desperate & Jobless.

Sad news this week, with Stuff running a story on how poor old David Bain can’t seem to find work, now that he’s a free man.

The reason, according to Auckland defence lawyer Peter Williams QC, is simple; Bain would be suffering from the stigma experienced by ex-prisoners re-entering the workplace. "There's obviously a very strong prejudice against people who can say their recent CV was inside prison" he reckons.

Perhaps.

Or maybe it’s just that for every man who sees Bain as the BFG there’s one who worries that even if he did employ him he might just turn up early to work one morning wearing a green jersey, white gloves, socks and brandishing a .22 rifle with a silencer.

I for one sympathise because I more than most know how the stigma from your past can affect your job prospects. When I got back from ‘Nam nobody wanted to offer me a job, not until I stopped wearing the camo and even then, only after I relinquished my M16 and bush knife.

My first job back was in the Asian food market which lasted all of three minutes. It was just too soon for me, too damn soon.

But eventually I learnt to bottle my rage and gain meaningful employment. So all slaughtered family jokes aside we are quite the resourceful lot here at ClubDes and we reckon we can offer Bain the following options:

1. He could work at MurderBurger.
2. Or pick up a paper run.
3. Maybe turn to stand up and be the guy who put the ‘laughter’ into manslaughter?
4. How about the homespun section at Spotlight?
5. He could write a book about he didn’t do it, then one about how he thinks he knows who did and then finally, in association with Kelvin Quickwank, how the dead have connected with him and forgiven him (for not doing it).

Staff Needed...

Bear And The Enema

This week I watched an episode of Man vs Wild where Bear Grylls gave himself a dirty water enema.

It was hands down one of the most disturbing and yet, most awesomest things I've seen.

Like any reality show, a lot of Man vs Wild is predetermined and staged, but even if the script called for a self administered enema it still takes a special guy to do it. Bear is that guy.

Now I must admit that I have never contemplated playing hide the sausage with a fella but if I did, Bear just might be that fella.

So long as it's not directly after a dirty water enema.

God (Bill) Touched Me

Sometimes, just sometimes, I come across something that even makes me laugh with the absurdity of it all. Today it was the receipt of the flyer from Bill & Pat Subritzky who on the face of it are fucken miracle workers.

Bill is a NZ Evangelist and Pat, his bitch. She follows Bill around the world conducting evangelistic outreach meetings and teaching seminars for women on behalf of the Body of Christ. Or so says the blurb on their website but I reckon she follows him around for another reason; he loves laying his healing hands on women.

Take the testimonies on the flyer – all the standard chaff about healing cancer, arthritis and kidney failure etc and all made by women. “Jesus Christ Saves and Heals” reads the flyer, whilst Bill it seems, fingers the feeble. The proof of the pudding is on the back of the flyer where Pat promises that in her meeting for women, you will receive the touch from God. Or Bill.

Of course, having read all that, I felt compelled to visit the Dove Ministries website (www.biblicalbullshit.com) where I honestly expected to find them selling bottled miracles or at the very least, Bills man juice.

They’re not, but it sounds like they should be, especially with their extensive list of testimonials including the Gods work they did in Nigeria where they verified the work of a fellow bullshit artist who claims to have performed such miracles as:

1. Healing impotency.
2. Deliverance of witches.
3. Healing of breasts.
4. Healing people of HIV.
5. Women healed of barrenness.
6. Woman healed of Parkinson disease.
7. Paralysed young man with broken spinal cord is healed.
8. Deaf boy healed.
9. Healing of blindness, diabetes and heart problem.
10. Stillborn baby brought back to life when sermon notes laid on him.
11. Man locked in iron bars because of insanity is healed.
12. Dead Man for 90 minutes Raised At Church Of Synagogue
13. Healing of epilepsy.
14. English woman healed instantly from blindness.
15. American woman healed from bronchitis, breathing problems, heart problems, triple bypass, as well as emphysema.
16. South African woman with osteoporosis and fracture of the spine, chronic bladder infection and insomnia. Wears a jacket brace to hold back together. God touched her mightily.

Through the site you can book a trip for $270 a week plus another $200 for a visa. The Subritsky’s recommend you stay two weeks in order to get yourself touched mightily. Nothing is too difficult for God.

I don’t know about you lot but I am sold. I plan to go as soon as the nightmares from my last trip there cease. That was the time I got an email from my long lost uncle telling me he had a two million dollar inheritance for me but I’d have to send him some money because he could transfer it out.

Rather than transfer him the cash – far too risky I reckoned – I decided to hand deliver the cash. I emailed him to tell him I was on my way and enclosed a photo of me so he could pick me out at the airport.

Once I arrived I was beaten and taken to a small hotel room on the outskirts of town. I was stripped and kissed by dark and very hairy men. One of the men, named Carl, was very gentle and told me he loved me but the others were rough. So very rough.

I struggled and told them I was a friend of my uncle but they tied me up and took turns kissing my beautiful body, touching me and making me do things I had sometimes thought about and imagined, but had never expected to really happen because I am straight.

The fact that one of the men looked like a black version of my dad kind of freaked me out and Carl turned out to be huge but like I said, he was very gentle and we just took things really slow. He's cool, we have swapped emails since. Nothing gay though, because he knows I am straight.

On second thought, no thanks God, that was all the touching I need.

Is it just me or do Bill and Pat look a lot alike....?

Put The Seat Back On Aye Fellas?

Cyclists. Have you hit one with your car yet?

I haven’t but my mate Bruiser has and despite the cyclist breaking all the standard rules of the road guess who got to pay for the damage? Here’s a clue, not the fuckwit in the spandex.

I read a magazine article some months ago titled ‘Cycling; The New Golf’ which listed how cycling is going through the same surge in popularity as golf did several years ago when every man and his dog decided to take up the game, thus ruining it for everybody else on the course.

Had this invasion of the common man been left unchecked then golf may well have found itself in a situation where cycling finds its self today – a three way (yes please!) pressure cooker comprised of the hard out old school riders, the Johnny come lately poseurs and the cars on the roads that they're all fighting over.

Golf avoided the same agro dance off howvere because it has a class structure in place which works in keeping the riff raff off the good courses and relegates them to the dog runs. It does this by charging exorbitant green fees and memberships in the hundreds.

Now you could argue you would pay the same for a bike, especially if it’s made from some super tough, yet super light metal that isn’t even known to man yet, as most seem to be, but once you’ve made that one of purchase no one is charging you to ride three abreast on the road whilst you chat with your mates from the office, are they?

I should point out that I am a fan of the cycling movement and do appreciate those cyclists, like my mate Stu, who have been riding for a long time and play the game according to the rules. These are the guys who can ride almost as fast as you can legally drive, are visible and most importantly are aware of their surroundings. Sometimes even far more than we drivers are.

Those guys I have a lot of time for. Not in a lets share a long, warm shower kind of way, but as in a form of mutual respect because I for one would want a little more between me and the tarmac than bike pants if I could get up to the speed that Stu and his mates do.

Then there are cyclists like Trevor Mallard, the former MP of the same name, who don their expensive lycra outfits, remove the seats from their adamantium cycle frames and free wheel it down the hill to the local cafe for a latte.

And he’s not alone. Drive by any such eatery on the weekends and chances are it will be full of part time cyclists discussing their Shimano gears and half arsed drafting technique over a flat white. Which defeats the point of all the exercise, doesn’t it? When was the last time you watched a rugby or football game where the players lined up for a coffee at half time?

Which brings us to the crux of the matter really; taking shit seriously. Those cyclists that do are not in it to socially network with likeminded followers of fashion. They ride the distances and reach the speeds they do because that’s the level at which they need to be at aerobically to make gains. It’s not a logic that applies solely to cycling mind you; it’s true of all exercise.

Those that don’t coast down the flats with their skin tight jumpers unzipped trying to look like they’ve achieved that same threshold but miraculously, never break a sweat. Their idea of a Tour de France is stopping at the French cafe on the corner. Wankers.

So if you do have to hit one and with the saturation of cyclists on the roads these days and not a matter of 'if', but 'when', then make sure it’s one of them coffee drinkers aye?

Make the roads a little safer for everyone.

Trevor stretches his underworked hammy whilst waiting for his trim latte..

Man Love - Tim Roth

I don’t say this often about a fella but Tim Roth gets me moist.

He has done since I saw him play Mr Orange in Reservoir Dogs, a movie I only ever saw in bits and pieces but never from end to end for about seven years. Don’t ask me why, that’s just how it panned out. As if Reservoir Dogs wasn’t confusing enough try watching it in hour long chunks only.

These days he plays walking lie detector Dr Cal Lightman on the TV show Lie to Me and he’s excellent. He’s like Hugh Laurie was when House started out; tre cool. Hugh is still cool but several seasons on and I can’t help but think ‘just how many hard to diagnose mystery illnesses are there?’ when watching House.

Doesn’t anyone just get Herpes anymore?

Anyway, Roth has another distinction that even he isn’t aware of – he’s second in line to play me in a movie of my life should Christian Bale turn down the role. And why would he, it’s the role of a lifetime.

One of these guys is the real me, the other two are thespians.

Armageddon It?

There’s a certain irony in having the Armageddon Expo at Easter. I turned up half expecting the place to be under siege by the devoutly religious but unless they were dressed as Manga characters, I saw none.

One thing there is plenty of at The Expo is poindexter. In fact there’s so much geek in one room I’m honestly surprised the internet didn’t stop this weekend. It was surely faster the whole weekend for those at home surfing porn on the days they couldn’t get down to the shops to buy more gadgets that allow them to surf and store, more porn.

Armageddon isn’t always held on Easter weekend but there are two certainties at Easter; chocolate and retailers claiming that the Easter Trading Laws are outdated. Well they would say that wouldn’t they? It doesn’t help that the penalty for opening when you’re not allowed is a paltry sum in regards to what the retailer makes on the day, so where’s the deterrent? How about common fucken sense?

There are only a handful of days where families can be families and not be distracted by the lure of buying something they don’t really need to impress others that don’t really care. Some wanker on TV reckoned that if Garden Centres weren’t open on Good Friday then people wouldn’t have anything to do the long weekend. Yes they would, they’d just have to buy what they need before Friday!

Retailers should welcome the few days off that they get and not spend the entire time passing a brick about just how much they won’t make on the day. Who knows, they might actually enjoy it and maybe, just maybe, the world will be the better place for it.

Back, then, to Armageddon, where the essence of sweaty boy is always in the air. Now I admit I am a fan boy at heart, still. I collected comics for a long time and G.I.Joe toys for even longer, so I like a good GeekCon, but unfortunately Armageddon is slowly moving away from being one.

It is one of the few places however, where a fella can take a photo of anybody with no questions are asked. If that somebody happens to be a young girl clad in the skimpiest of homemade costumes then so be it; she’s not complaining and she’ll never know that once you’ve had a wank over it you’ll post it to a web site where other fan boys can masturbate over it too.

Of course there are a lot of homemade Cosplay efforts going on which is great, I love that shit, but there’s something about a morbidly obese Storm Trooper that isn’t quite right...

Michael Winslow is there every year. He’s the guy from the Police Academy movies that did all the noises. He is genuinely a funny guy is Mike and his improv noise making is very funny, but his actual showpiece is getting dated. Not to mention that over half the audience at Armageddon don’t know who he is or what movies he was in.

This year he was joined by another ‘star’ from the Academy movies, Marion Ramsey, who played the timid recruit Laverne who could scream down a jumbo jet when riled. She also has quite possibly the biggest pair of boobs ever to grace Armageddon, which would be great if they were spectacular, but sadly they’re not.

She wooed the comic book crowd by singing, karaoke style, two Tina Turner songs. The two women in from Wainui sitting in front of us loved it, everyone else preyed it would end at just two, whilst those watching under the age of 10 just wondered when the ice cream eating competition would start.

Then there were the crowd flow problems, the complete lack of interactive display availability i.e. some hard out Harry hogging the EA Sports FIFA 10 demo and the disappointingly expensive everything. All of which left me wondering what did I just get for my $18? Two hours of my life I’ll never get back?

But then maybe I am expecting too much from an event that is run for slackers, by slackers. Maybe as I grow older I become less of a fan boy and more of an impatient old man than I care to admit and try to disguise by wearing my G.I.Joe tee shirt. Maybe I should go to the garden centre next Easter and not the expo?

Nah.

Drama On The High Seas (But No Explosions).

By now you probably know of Pete Buffoon – sorry, Bethune – the NZ guy under arrest in Japan for boarding one of their whaling ships and trying to put the entire crew under arrest. What a guy.

He failed, quite possibly because he ignored the golden rule when taking on anyone Asian; be extra careful because they probably know Kung Fu. They didn’t as it turned out, but the fact he was heavily outnumbered was obviously something he hadn’t planned for. Or did he?

He was on the Japanese ship because his catamaran, or rather Greenpeace’s, was run down by the said whaling ship a week earlier. We’ve all seen the footage of the moment it happened and as far as boats’ running each over goes, it was pretty damn cool. Disappointingly, there was no explosion. In the movies there’s always an explosion.

We’ve all played ‘chicken’ with someone or something in our time and this was the ultimate in both escalation and consequence. Again Bethune made an elementary error here; he tried to out chicken men from the country who gave us the Kamikaze during World War II. Good one, Pete.

Now some might say that it was karma that Bethune’s ride got sliced in half by the Japanese ginsu; payback for his running over and killing some fisherman whilst racing around the world (in the same catamaran), trying to beat some record that no one really gives a flying fuck about. Yeah. What a worthy cause that turned out to be.

That effort left Bethune financially crippled and his wife – who must have the patience of a saint – probably hoped he would give all the boat shit up, come home and mow the bloody lawns or something. Anything. But no. Some rich bugger bought the boat, gifted it to Greenpeace and asked Bethune to go with it. Some paramilitary looking wetsuits and acid throwing antics later, he finds himself facing charges in a country where the successful prosecution rate is a whopping 99%! What a peen-arse.

Now I should say at this stage that I support Bethune in his cause, which is to stop the Nips whaling the fuck out of our oceans. That I’m behind that 110%. But I have a heightened sense of distrust at some of Greenpeace’s motives and actions that start with the way their hippies keep trying me to sign up and buy one of their books on the street.

Watch any of the guys who are in cahoots with Bethune and you get a unnerving sense that they actually enjoy the chase they put in on these whalers. Once upon a time just bringing it to the world’s attention was enough for the Greenies but these guys have been sensing blood for a long time and it ain’t the harpooned whales in the water we’re talking about here...

Which brings us back to just who ran into who that fateful day and Bethune’s subsequent attempt at making Under Siege 3 onboard the whaler. Bringing attention to a worthy cause is one thing, attention getting because you’re a dick is another.

It doesn’t help that our government is doing sweet fuck all about the whole sorry saga. Rather than giving the Japs a damn good ticking off we have National talking about actually introducing a quota system for whale hunting. What the?!

That guy who used to sing for Midnight Oil and is now an Australian MP has gotten his stringer in a twist over our stance and I don’t blame. But then ‘Blue Sky Mine’ is one of my fave Australasian tracks of all time so maybe I’m a bit bias.

My dear old Granddad hated the Japs and he would be turning in his grave at the sight of this Bethune bullshit. He’d have one solution and it would involve the NZ Navy accidentally-on-purpose harpooning one of the whaling ships with a torpedo, like they would have done back in 1944. And he’d be right too; we could claim it was for ‘research purposes’ and that would be the end of it.

And we’d get an explosion. Just like in the movies.

Bring Back The Map

Sometimes I wonder why we still have street signs. Especially when it seems every second car these days has GPS or some other anagrammed symbol of the moronification of NZ on the dash.

We Kiwis love having shit on the dash. This is why I reckon there are so many boy racers in NZ because all those dials that do sweet fuck all, just look great on the dash. In every other country they just look ridiculous, but not here in NZ, we love that shit, almost as much as we do wearing our caps on a jaunty angle.

Before the advent of the GPS the cool thing to have suckered to the windscreen, just above the dash, was the radar detector. Some cars now have both, thus doubling their ‘this car contains a fuckstick’ quotient because not only does the driver not know where he’s going, he’s likely to be speeding when trying to get there.

Getting from point A to point B is one of the most human of attributes but evolution seems determined to remove it from our brains. Which is a shame here in NZ, more than most places, because for a long time we were proud of our ability to be resourceful with things like maps and compasses.

It was this resourcefulness that led thousands of boys like me to things like Cubs and Scouts to learn orienteering and knot tying. But then some Scout leaders out in Whitby went and fingered their entire troop and stuffed it up for everybody. I bet they use a GPS these days.

We could still stop the rot but for some I fear it’s too late, like those who use theirs on the motorway which are, for the most part, long and straight with exits to places like J Town clearly labelled. Or those that rely on theirs to get them around the area they’ve lived in all their lives. It’s almost as if they live in fear that one of these mornings they’re going to wake up and by the way of some celestial miracle the local council will have completely rearranged all the roads in the city.

Or maybe they’re just dumb. Why just the other day I drove through P Town and couldn’t help but feel a little bit dumber for the experience. Why is that I wonder?

If you don’t have a GPS fear not - you can still use Goggle Earth on the laptop which you could mount to the dash. Google Earth allows you to zoom in on the place you’re looking for from a satellite. In outer space. Which is handy really when your think that your car, thanks to a little thing called gravity, is rooted to the road.

Google Maps on the other hand lets you see your destination in glorious two dimensions because some perve in a fan photographed the place. A pity then that he didn’t do the same to the street signs because it might’ve gone a long way to reminding people just how you get from one place to another by linking several of them together.

Admittedly a GPS might be great, in downtown Baghdad, or if we were to remove our entire street signage because Ze Germans are coming, but fortunately we are faced with neither. So don’t buy one just because every other clown has one. Bring back the map I say.

Besides, a map is much cheaper and you'll get a bigger satisfaction woody from using one than you will a GPS.

Our home made GPS works a treat...