Mt Maunganui - Land of the Weird

Welcome, then, to Tauranga, the city where laws like having to wear a helmet whilst cycling and not using your cellphone whilst driving were made to be broken.

And you and I both know that these perps would’ve gotten to that state via gateway misdemeanours like jay walking and not actually fully coming to stop at a stop sign..

Not that there’s anything new in that state of lawlessness, my history with this part of the world includes being the place where I learnt - and first got caught - shoplifting. It was the classic rookie error too, I reached above the ice cream fridge / counter thing to steal a chocolate bar, because I didn’t think the shopkeeper could see me doing so….through the glass.

It’s also the place where I had my first interracial sexual experience. I kissed the Maori girl from next door that I fancied on the cheek. I think we were 10.

See my father lived in Greerton and in the years before his eternal paternal abandonment I would holiday here with him for months on end, or whenever it suited Mother to have me back which as far as I was concerned, was always way too soon. Them were good times.

My father’s then soon to be wife was a hottie who had a thing about leaving bowls of lollies on the table as a snack. Naturally being under the age of pubes and starved of such a thing back in the real world, I gulfed them down like a kid with diabetes.

In fact everyone was forever giving me lollies. The stoners next door would buy me bags of the things just for cutting down a bush with the wooden sword Dad made me, whilst said sexy Step Mum let me pick what I wanted as a $10 mixture for one of my birthdays. And that was back in the day when things cost a cent!

We’re not staying in Greerton though, the extended ClubDes family and I. No we’re in Mt Maunganui, one of the countries hotspot's at this time of the year. Fuck knows why because this place is distinctly average. Oh sure, it has a beach but the Gold Coast it ain’t.

The holiday house we’re staying in is quaint, in an ‘everything is bloody backwards’ way, like the light switches which are in the last places you expect them to be and gates open outwards, not inwards. That kind of thing.

The owners must be grandparents too because there are kiddie locks on everything, the ones that require a degree in dexterial engineering to open them. Those things are going to be a shitter when the arthritis kicks in. Maybe just teach your kids not to go into cupboards aye?

Crimes against fashion runs into their thousands up this way and far be it from me and my Scott Disick GQ style to criticise but some people round here are dressing themselves in the dark, surely. All of which just adds to the ‘weird’ factor of the place really.

Like the Upper Hutt Posse across the road who had a skateboard and bongo drums party the first night we were here. I kid you not. There were more black metal tee shirts on show than one of those Asian run knock off shops and yes they did get the Led out around midnight, but yet somebody bought the drums…

Still, it’s a holiday which means you don’t really give a shit about those things. Besides, I pulled up alongside a mint, cherry red Dodge Charger in the main street the second day and the sight and sound of it will keep the mecaphilliac wank bank stocked nicely thanks very much.

Roll on New Year’s, maybe then I'll discover what all the fuss about this place is really about...

The missus and I are making this place look good, real good.

Life Lessons, From The Bouncy Seats

Conversation turned to trampolines in The Club the other day, partly because Lancey has just gotten his clan one.

Not a trampoline the likes of which we had back in the day mind, no this is one of those can’t hurt you ever, can’t have fun jobs. Which got to us discussing just how those death traps on legs from days gone by, provided us kids with a rite of passage into later life, something Lancey’s spawn will now miss out on thanks to the Big Limp Dick Safety Brigade.

Who didn’t learn a valuable lesson from getting their nuts crunched and pinched when falling through the springs on a trampoline? Not to mention failed flips, mistimed landings from nearby structures or launches into pools that came up short.

Every kid had at least one incident of being catapulted off the damn thing by an older kid bouncing twice as high as every other bugger. That usually ended in a mistimed attempted landing on the frame from a great height, thus crunching the gnads and grazing the ankle / shin / thigh when landing half in the springs and half off the frame.

If you were really lucky you finished that particular artistic move with a face plant on the grass below. I can still hear the laughter now…

Who didn’t find out the hard way that laying underneath it whilst your older brother depth charged the hell out of the thing in a stress test that was never tried in the factory because it was presumed that such a load would ever be heaped upon it and even if so, who would be silly enough to sit under it if it was?

Well we were of course and a couple of those in the head and back learned us didn’t it.

What about the valuable lesson we were all given on the importance of maintaining balance whilst sitting in the corner awaiting your turn only to fall forward or worse, backwards, off the thing when some bugger got a little eager and upset the structural balance by jumping in early, making the ‘no more than two’ rule Mum always dropped on us a very valid point.

I lost count how many times I got ejected by clothesline, flying drop kick or throw to the imaginary ropes that failed to stop me from the copious Royal Rumbles we ran on ours. Dodgeball was another big favourite at our house, until some hard out fired the thing at point blank range whilst you were mid flight and took your legs clean out from under you. Many an emerging facial pube was removed in the resulting face to spring action that inevitably led to.

Ours had a particular design flaw too that meant if you bounced hard enough, on just the right angle, the leg would pop out from the frames which lead to a monumental collapse of epic proportions. I can still see my sister hurtling off it at an acute angle after just such a structural fuck up.

Not that some of us have stopped learning from the humble trampoline. Bruiser has lost two in as many years in a perfect example on how impossible it is to anchor the bastards when you live high above the common folk in the valley below.

One of them very nearly made it down there too only to be swallowed the bush on the hillside directly below his place mid flight. It will be found one day like a forgotten plane wreck leading those who located it to question “How the fuck did this get here?”

The other came to rest through the rear window of the Audi owned by some Asians down the road. Their response to that was to chain the bent and broken frame in their front yard till someone claimed it. Of course that didn’t really pan out because we all know how Asians are with answering their door when knocked on; they don’t. How the hell did they think that was going to work?!

So Lancey’s lot will experience none of this and miss out on some of life’s cruellest, but essential lessons. They will instead be bored with it after about five minutes and move back indoors to the gaming consoles.

No one ever got a gaming console to the balls.

Electing the Phallus

Well another Election has come and gone and what a shambles it turned out to be.

Not the actual running of the thing because that’s always well run, Iraq this ain’t. But the result was as predictable as the pool comp we sometimes run here at work which Almo will always win, unless he monumentally fucks it up. Which he did last time actually, so go figure.

Turn out on Saturday was its lowest ever and say what you will about the disenfranchised youth of today it doesn’t take four years of completing a political major to work out some folk just couldn’t be arsed voting in a one horse race.

You should see what it’s like round here trying to get a lady godiver out of the masses when they know full well that A-Fed is going to win it all anyway…

They had a couple of the young Mensa members on the news the other night actually, explaining just why it was they didn’t vote. They came up with some truly inspiring gems of spiritual enlightenment too, like “I don’t really care eh” and ‘I had better things to do” which some might argue that it’s the kind of answer only the gifted could come up with. Maybe. I would argue that from the Occupational Overuse Syndrome that had set in on both their right hands, that they were complete wankers.

Now I skipped my Seventh Form Formal because ‘I had better things to do”. But then that was several hours of trying to suppress an erection in a hired suit at a tacky-but-wishes-it-was-swanky location, the ticket to which cost far too much to not include any alcohol whatsoever.

I didn’t actually have better things to do. My mother wouldn’t let me go. But that’s irrelevant.

Mrs ClubDes and I called into the local polling booth – not to be confused with the local pulling booth because that’s a whole separate blog – on our way to my sisters wedding. Thus we were right glammed up in our number ones which solicited the very humorous, but not entirely unpredictable “Glad to see you got dressed up to vote” joke from the guy who had probably sat there checking out women's chests all day.

“Please put a tit - I mean tick - on each form…”

Attending weddings are great. Except that bit before hand where you have to think about what you’re going to buy the happy couple because even if they have a gift registrar here and there, who really knows what they want. We went with towels because you can never have enough towels. Or pillows.

I briefly contemplated gifting my blister something that would spark a memory of our childhood which inevitably got me thinking about a salt and pepper shaker that her mother used to have. It can best be described as a monster porcelain penis with a separate ball sack, because that’s what it was.

It was a white gloss finish with green cartoon love hearts on both twig and berries. It stood about eight inches tall with a girth wide enough to bring a tear the eye of anyone who looked at it which was everyone, because it sat on our MANTLEPIECE for all to see, all of the time.

Needless to say I didn’t subject her new husband and future nephews to the emasculation that is a foot long cock with bovine testes in the living room.

Speaking of giant phallus, how chuffed are you that the million or so who didn’t vote on Saturday helped get these cocks back in power:

Bring In The Boat Pirates

Amongst all the shit and giggles that has been the rugby world cup there is the small matter of an environmental disaster happening off the coast of Tauranga.

You’ve probably heard about it. It has been the lead news story everywhere except that is for this weekend when the semi finals of said ‘world’ cup took precedence. Perhaps nothing washed ashore those days.

In a remarkable segue that somehow made the fact that no one was giving a shit about the oil spill today almost okay, both 6pm news programs had touching stories about how the cleanup workers from both NZ and Australia would down tools that evening and watch the rugby together, putting aside their common goal for just a bit. Good times.

I guess when you’re doing a job like that there has to be some escape from the drudgery of it all. I wouldn’t do a job like that because I am inherently lazy so I admire all those people who’ve put on the white overalls and mucked in. Especially seeing as we’re supposed to be holidaying there in the New Year...

Now I’m no seaman, my service was all on land, if you could call the giant rice paddy that was Vietnam ‘land’, so I don’t know a lot about boats and steering the fuckers but it does seem odd to me that amongst that entire ocean the Philippine Captain managed to find the one sandbar for miles.

And then I read that it was his birthday that particular day. What do sailors do on their birthdays if at sea, other than try and drop anchor in each others poo bay? Drink. Like the fish they’re surrounded by.

But being the ideas man that I am I have a solution to stop these things from happening again and it can be best encapsulated in word: Somali boat pirates.

We could get a bunch of them to run the gauntlet between sand bars and the like so that even the most pished of Captains stays away from the bloody things. What’s more, I know where to find some; in my old hood, Naenae.

I happened to visit them mean streets the other day whilst picking up something and with all the flags on vans proliferating the place I thought I was in downtown Mogadishu and hey I would know, I’ve seen Black Hawk Down like three times.

All jokes aside it was a bit sad to see the old haunt in such bad disarray. I can’t pretend that it was Beverly Hills back in the day but it was a neighborhood that by in large was filled with people who took pride in their properties and cars etc. As kids we never really understood just how much of a difference that made to the place.

Not that keeping up with The Joneses is what life is about, not by a long shot, but it says a lot about the community when people are motivated and comfortable with their environment to spend their weekends in the garden or washing the car.

It’s that same sense of community that gets those same people out on the beach cleaning up the oil spill that could have been prevented if we had Somali boat pirates patrolling the coastline.

I rest my case.

The Naenae Massive, ready to represent.

Canada, Oh Cana-duh.

Week three of the RWC is all done then all that early talk about the worlds minnows closing the gap on the big boys seems complete arse now doesn’t it? Putting 50 points on someone doesn’t make for a riveting competition no matter which way you look at it.

Of all the minnows in the Rugby World Cup the one country that I probably have the softest spot for are the Canadians.

My father – he of the abandon his only son when he was 10 fame – lived there for a long while. He sent me a Canadian flag once and I’ve still got it somewhere because it’s a wonderful reminder of the loving bond between a father and son, is a flag of somewhere I’ve never been to.

Around the same time our family (on Mothers side) was accosted by a bunch of Canadians who had taken to a bit of family treeing and worked out that they were related to us. And this before the days of the interweb so who really knows what they found.

My grandparents being, well, grandparents lapped that shit up and it wasn’t long before the recollections of things like Christmases past were altered in the telling to include a mention of the Canadian branch of the family.

I think they mus have thought they were coming to tame the natives when they came over too because they bought with them trinkets, like badges, all of which had ‘Alberta, Canada’ plastered all over them. Because everybody loves wearing a badge of somewhere they have never been to.

Bruiser, Coops and I had a Canadian maths teacher in 6th form who wrote on the blackboard in reverse order to any other teacher, ever. He’d start on the far side and move backwards so when you arrived late and started copying down what you though was the first block of work it was, in fact, the last.

By the stage you realised what was going out he had rubbed the first bit out (the furthest bit of the board) anyway so you were stuffed. Of course we never read what we were copying so how were we to know it didn’t make chronological sense?

He also had the very amusing habit, depending if you were the one coming in late or not, of writing and explaining panels of mathematical theory only to decree that it was all lies and we should ignore it. At which point he’d put an ‘x’ through the lot. Good times.

There was also the small issue, being in NZ, of him not being able to pronounce anything in Maori, for example our classmate Irihapiti which as read out from the roll each week as Eerie hap eye tie. Later just shortened to Eerie.

Not too mention the four foot two Asian in the flared trousers (short backward square to you cricketers) who’s name was Kan Hau but you know how it is with Asians, last name first and all that but not on the roll. So the convo went a little like this:

Teech: Hau? Hau Kan.
KH: Kan sir, here.
Teech: Pardon me?
KH: Its just Kan sir.
Teech: But on here it says Hau.
KH: Yes sir, that’s my first name. But in Korean we say last name first.
Teech: So your name is Hau Hau?
KH: No its just Kan.
Teech: So it’s just Kan Kan?
KH: No its just Kan.

Everyone had to change seats by this stage as most were wet.

I even had a pretty serious case of the lusties for a girl I went to school with who had spent time in Vancouver, of all places and was into ice hockey, big time. I don't remember exactly but I'm pretty sure that my attraction probably had something to do with he-who-shall-not-be-named (Father) was also living in Vancouver and that's just messed up.

These days my connection to the land of the maple leaf and sauce is through the original draft dodger, T-Bag. He’s loving it over there and no doubt sharing the Rugger with the locals. The Canucks even had their first win the other day, against Tonga and I’m not sure if the party will still be going, but if it is you can bet our man Borlase will be right in the thick of it.

He certainly won't be reading this because in an ironic twist of fate, he can't, not at work anyway:

The Prank Call Lives On

Just in case we were in any doubt, further proof this week that big business blows. Like the companies that make the milk telling us that it is OUR fault it’s not cheaper, because we don’t shop around enough. Wankers.

What about the little fact that all the supermarkets are owned by only two companies? There’s your competition right there. Servos are so expensive with things like bread and milk you might as well buy petrol and pour that on your weetbix. But again, big business owners, so no real surprise and we all know the tight buggers that run the corner dairy are not going to undercut no bastard.

Small businesses on the other hand, don’t blow. I was reminded of something a few weeks ago when I saw the story of the Nelson fish & chip shop that is losing money thanks to some noob that keeps ringing and placing a huge order that he never collects.

This story struck a chord with me because 20 years ago I was that kid and as funny as it was back then I realise now, as a fully pubed adult, that somebody inevitably suffers with a prank such as this and in the case of a small business it’s usually the owner.

Still, it’s bloody funny. Well at least it was back in the day when Willie G and I used to wag school and call up all the local takeaway shops. Quite why alarm bells weren’t ringing in these places when a kid - admittedly a deep voiced one at that - was placing a huge order in the middle of the day I shall never know.

Not that we were content just placing fake orders; in a similar vein we’d often ring people and in our best pigeon Mandarin claim that the person listed in the phonebook had a tab with us which now needed to be paid. Quite what the Golden Dragon in Naenae did with all the money that confused strangers came in and paid on nonexistent accounts we’ll never know, but we should probably have asked for a cut.

Incidentally I’ve always had a deep voice and from an early age and it was in no way related to the size, or sling, of the man berries because they let me down on both counts right throughout my teens. I mean they’re enormous now, obviously, that’s what the wheelbarrow beside my desk is for…

Like most kids my age in Third Form I had very little interest in school or authority and had a peer councillor, Steven, our Seventh Form class prefect who did an okay job but to be fair was more interested in getting his hands on our other class prefect and I don’t blame him, she was tidy. During one of the many him-me-Guidance Counsellor session’s that only exist to employ such people in schools, Steven endeared himself to me by blurting out halfway through a very heavy conversation about just why I was such a little shit “But he has such a deep voice….its so funny”.

By far the biggest and bestest phone prank we pulled (and I say ‘we’ only to try and deflect some of the blame now that I feel genuinely bad about it) was the time we phoned in a 30 kid birthday party for a mate at Maccas. Again, pubescent boy on the phone making detailed plans regarding another pubies party, hello?

But pulled it off we did and a couple of days after the ‘party’ date had come and gone our mate was telling us that Mum & Dad had been called by a furious Maccas Manager and been given an invoice for 30 unclaimed Happy Meals! Yes, it was still hilarious, but we did feel a tinge of regret so we didn’t tell our mate it was us who’d made the call. Everyone else we told of course, just not him.

So I feel for the guy in Nelson and his unclaimed phantom orders, like I do my mate. Still, there is a small part of me that is stoked to see the prank call is alive and well.

Kind To Your Hands

In this day and age where everything is wrapped in ‘new and improved packaging’ (which means what exactly and I give a shit why?) you occasionally come across something from a simpler time.

Usually that something is the old fulla in the office who types with two fingers, writes everything in pencil and religiously stops whatever he’s doing at 10.30am and 3pm for smoko, but sometimes it’s a product like this which optimises the phrase ‘no frills’.

I suspect my work buys Genes Grease Cutting Lemon Detergent because it’s cheap as chips anyway, but more so by the carton load. This particular bottle actually is the ‘new and improved’ packaging because it has a sticker on it, whereas the last lot we had was plain text printed on the bottle. Well retro.

And the best bit? That the lid is held on by several pieces of sellotape. That’s right. No tamper proof kiddie-no-bastard-can-open-it lock here, just some geezer taping down every lid on every bottle. If he’s lucky Gene might have invested in a tape gun by now, but I doubt it; the sticky label is enough progress thank you very much.

This reminds me of how Bruiser and I played silly buggers in Home Economics with the dish washing liquid one time and emptied a three litre bottle of the stuff into one sink of water. Well, what else were we going to do all lesson, cook? The very next lesson our old spinster of a teacher gave a 10 minute lecture on how totally unacceptable it was that we, as a class, had gone through so much detergent in one go. Result!

The funniest thing about that term of Home Ec was the table of Asian girls who always got there a little bit early and proceeded to slice and dice their way through a mountain of vegetables before anyone else had even got their gear out. This continued right up till we started to cook, even on the days we weren’t doing vegetables...

So good on you Gene. Your simple ways are indeed kind to my hands and to my hope that somewhere out there are folk like yourself who aren’t selling out to progress because everyone else is.

Boring Sports # 4 - Mixed Martial Arts

Mixed Martial Arts competitions are apparently quite popular these days. Apparently. Not only do I think MMA is a boring sport but when I see footage of two grown men doing this to each other for long periods of the bout I find it quite disturbing:

You’d never catch us ninjas doing that. Let’s face it, you’d never catch us ninjas full stop. For instance look around the room you’re sitting in, there are three ninjas hiding there right now. Can’t see them? Told you.

MMA for the uninitiated is a competition that brings all the popular martial arts together in one massive knock down throw down. It’s a Jean Claude Van Damme movie without the bad acting and slow mo spin kicks. It’s primal and most of the time brutal and just like boxing that’s what makes it so popular.

The fighters are not your standard pin up variety; they’re tough, full of sinew and almost to a man sport broken noses. The women are not much better except that is for Gina Carano who can, quite frankly, beat the shit out of me anytime she wants. You may recognise her from American Gladiators, I recognise her from the many ‘wife beats husband’ fantasies I’ve had involving her.

Now I know a thing or two about martial arts. Aside from the whole ninja thing Coops and I used to partake in a spot of it back in the day. He was quite good; I just liked the outfit and the weapons. Mostly just the outfit.

We had a ‘sensei’ and I do use the term loosely, who reckoned he attended many a MMA type event, a ‘fight to the death’ kind of thing. I won’t name him because he still kicks about today and is and always has been a complete nutter. Whilst I would eliminate him were it to come to him seeking me out there is always that element of the unknown when dealing with a mad man.

He used to ‘go’ to these tournaments and we’d not see him for a fortnight. Upon his return, unscathed it should be noted, he would regale us of just how far he got in the tournament – semi finals usually – and just how brutal it was. Something I could never understand though was if it really was a ‘death match’ competition, how he always survived despite not being the winner? Alarm bells, as they say, were ringing.

Of course, we had our suspicions that he’d not been to such a competition at all and had actually been staying down at his parent’s rural retreat in Nelson. We suspected this but never said anything because we were only 16 and clearly idol worshiped the man. Not to mention he was a screw loose, with easy access to weapons.

Needless to say that story, like MMA bouts, had a predictable ending; gradually we got too old for the bollocks of it all and moved on. Luckily for him there was a whole bunch of teenage boys afterwards that took our place and there always will be. MMA might be cool when you’re young, dum and full of cum, but to everyone else, it’s just boring.

Oh and those who think they’re ninjas stuff it up for those of us that actually are. Three in your room remember…

Gina can smack this bitch up any time she wants...

Happy Birthday Coops

Happy Birthday Coops. I know I’m a week late and you probably thought I forgot but I hadn’t, it’s just that our history runs deep so I’ve been busy doing the things we used to do, in celebration of your special day.

I started by trying to find the skin flick we watched that one time in the wee early hours of the morning at my house. You know the one, with the anal beads? Back then that was some kinky stuff, especially for a couple of 16 year olds like us, but not these days. Do you know just how many hits you get when you do a Google video search on that particular key word?

Then I consumed a six pack of Double Brown because that’s the only beer cheap enough for us to buy back in the day with your fake ID. I struggled to get through it because, quite frankly, it’s shit and it makes me wonder if the guys at the bottler that sold it to us picked us for a couple of kids all along but were just happy to get rid of the stuff.

I cycled from my house to yours like we always used to do. Quite the effort these days given we live 35 minutes by car and a major motorway away now, not the 10 we used to. Still, I managed to nick enough milk and newspapers from letterboxes like I always did to make the trip worthwhile. Oh and I stoned Bollocks house on the way. Turns out he doesn’t live there any more, shitto.

You weren’t home when I eventually got there but I let myself in and tried on some of your clothes, just like back in the day. They were too big, still, but I wore them anyway because you always had cool labels where mine just said ‘DEKA’.

I played Uno and chess, by myself, but still managed to trash talk myself the whole time. I watched all the Arnie and Hot Damn Van Damme movies in chronological order and even spent 45 minutes hidden in the back yard waiting to ambush you like I always did when we played war. Not surprisingly you never found me; yep, I’ve still got it.

Finally I took that long list of ours that had every girl from school on it we rated and that if they played their cards right, would get a bit of Coops & Deso. I looked them all up on Facebook and guess what? That list is now not as long as it used to be.

Naturally at that point I finished things (and myself) off with that love beads movie again.

So there you go big boy, a birthday celebration and a half.

I was always borrowing Coops' clothes.

Give Me The Daily Bread

It was bread night on Masterchef Australia last night.

I know, I know, Masterchef right? But now that Project Runway has finished but how else do I appease the wee gay man inside of me? And no RayWay, I’m not talking about you. Not this time anyway.

Now I get a serious case of the moistees when I see a good loaf of bread. Ciabatta is my favorite and I will gladly eat the stuff till I’m passing loaves of it, but I equally like any bread with a good hard crust on.

Every time we go to one of those farmers markets things - which to be fair is rare because I have a thing about crowds - I stand at the bread place staring longingly at the fare, just wanting to stroke the perfectly formed mounds of sour dough.

I like the look of the one that’s blacker than a black mans cape too but haven’t yet tried it and I’m always partial to a nice stiff baguette and, occasionally, a seeded loaf. I do draw the line at olives though. Not in my bread or my stool fuck you very much.

When I was younger my step father used to take me down to a bakery where his brother worked on Saturday mornings. He’d help him load up the trays full of freshly baked loaves ready for the pick up by the distribution trucks.

Whilst they spent the hours doing that I went around the loaves ripping of the melted cheese and crusty bits. Needless to say the guys at the bakery were not pleased but I was right chuffed because we had to take all the fiddled with loaves home to eat but only after I had been given a good tanning across the buttocks with step father’s belt. Still, I’d call that a result.

Incidentally, you would have thought that I would have learnt my lesson form that wouldn’t you? Some years later whilst living at the camping ground with Grandad I took to taking sips from the trays of 1.5 litre fizzy beverages he stocked to sell in the on site shop. You know the ones, with the safety seal on the cap? And to think I thought no one would notice…criminal genius I wasn’t.

Speaking of baking, I’d like to give a quick shout out to Remco Funke, the friendly Dutchman with the porn star name who is a long time listener, first time caller and although we have never officially met, I am reliably informed tunes in regularly. Welkom Remco, which translated from the Dutch means ‘welcome’. I like you already.

Like so many of my adult weirdness I blame my step father for my bread fetish, for it was he that would nip down to the local dairy on a Sunday morning and return with a crusty tiger loaf under one arm and the Sunday News under the other. Of course back in those days said Sunday News always had a Page 3 girl so clearly I equated her baps with those of the crusty variety and thus an erotic connection was made.

Much in the same way some folk say that we fellas love a navel piercing because it reminds us of the staples in a stick mag. I wouldn’t know about that, I hardly ever made it as far as the middle on those things; the articles were always too good.

I never did last the entire episode of Masterchef last night either, once they started fondling their Artisan Rye Sourdough and banging their dinner rolls together I had to change channels...

Mr Brown Comes Around

I thought I might lower the tone a little with some toilet humor, literally. Well, it’s funny now but at the time I was well bricking it.

I was on a four hour coaching course the other day and had a pretty good dose of the Sunday shits, so come the morning tea break I made my way down to the one and only toilet for what was by then Part Three of my Sunday blockbuster.

Imagine then, my horror to find only after the paperwork was done that the thing wouldn’t flush! The button on the cistern was jammed down leaving only the little half flush option and it just wasn’t cutting it.

It really is moments like these that the thought crosses your mind ‘How the hell am I going to explain this?!’ knowing full well that there’s two hours of the course to go and 16 guys upstairs who are unlikely to have spent their spare time doing pelvic floor exercises thus giving them exquisite bladder control.

Now forgot about your witnessing a mugging scenario, this really is one of those fight or flee everyday situations. I could’ve legged it and claimed ignorance when somebody else had to break the news that the crapper was crapped out, but I didn’t. I stood and fought that cistern lid till I had it off and that flush button free.

Then I flushed. Dammit did I flush and not since the infamous incident of me soiling my camouflaged y-fronts at Primary school that time have I been so glad to see the brown wash down.

So the lesson here class is two fold;

1. If you have the Sunday shits, don’t go to anything longer than an hour in duration.
2. But if you do always, always check the facilities are working before you answer the knock of Mr Brown at the back door.

As you were.

Liar, Liar.

If there is one thing I’ve learnt in 30 something years of making my own coherent decisions it’s that lying has a time and a place.

Doing so whilst in Police custody, whilst under the suspicion of murder, is not one of those times. But yet, two wankers subsequently found guilty this past week claimed that they did just that, because they were ‘scared’.

Now I know a thing or two about telling a fib. I’ve done everything from claiming my name was Thad to professing to have invented the question mark and they were just the lame ones. But I’ve never cracked one when accused of something serious that I never actually did, especially when the result of that lie could highly likely lead to stand up sodomy in the communal showers.

I remember one such occasion in my college days. We had this regular reliever who claimed he had been a Special Forces soldier in the UK before coming to NZ to be a relieving teacher. Yeah right. To this day I still can’t picture him as the red beret he claimed to be and of course I challenged him on it regularly because if there was one thing I knew at the age of 14 it was army shit.

Anyhoo, we had him for PE one day. Have I told you about the time I got caught reading a porno mag whilst at PE? That’s another story entirely. As this guy wasn’t a real teacher he had to get changed with us and my mate Tim O’Niell decided that it would be hilarious to hide his keys under a stack of cones in the gym. Tim did tell me he had done it too but as he was a bigger bullshit artist than me I took no notice.

This also happened to be the last period of the day so whilst we were all on our way home our highly trained killer of a substitute was frantically looking for his house and car keys. When he couldn’t find them he went to the assistant principal and of course he only had one suspect didn’t he – the smartarse military historian; me.

The school called home and my father-in-law, he who looked to pin everything on yours truly, gladly marched me and his thickest, blackest black leather belt back down to school. He didn’t need the belt to hold his pants up either. Into the APs office I was shoved and expected by all in attendance to produce said keys, from my anus obviously, because I’d already had the pat down at home.

Needless to say shit got emotional; I was crying, Mr Red Beret was crying and yet I was adamant I hadn’t taken his fucken keys, because I hadn’t. Oh sure, I knew who had but that wasn’t the question was it? I didn’t want to drop Tim in it but after about half an hour of this and coincidentally about the time my step father started taking off his belt, I dobbed him in.

Tim turned up with his Mum and confessed. The keys were returned and the whole sorry saga ended with him getting a kick up the arse all the way to the car by Mrs O’Niell and my step father giving me an encouraging “Okay so you didn’t take them but you fucken knew who did!”

Tim and I laughed it off the next day and he reckoned he was cool with me doing the dirty because I’d held out for as long as I had which made the whole joke funnier. And that probably would have been the end of that but a few years later karma came back to haunt me though when I walked in on him masturbating. He even found that funny.

Notice that never at any stage during that entire incident did I claim to have witnessed who took the keys before being raped by the real culprits and who later returned to my house, put a docking ring on my chopper and threatened to cut it off if I told anyone what I had seen. It’s a good thing I didn’t because that would have forced me to confess to taking the keys.

One legged Dean Mulligan claimed that as his reason for confessing to the murder of Marice McGregor this week. His lawyer admitted that yes, his client was a compulsive liar but this last story of his (there had been four others) was so fantastical, so far out there it could actually be true. The fuck it was.

How this guy got his day in court is beyond me and how his lawyer had the gall to stand there and try and defend him is equally perplexing. It took the jury four hours to find Mulligan guilty and I think it was a miracle it took them that long.

We never did see Mr Commando back at school after the whole keys thing either.

PlankPlankPlankPlank

Planking. It’s what all the kids are doing apparently and is the next ‘big’ in a long line of ‘things’ that we adults look at and wonder “what the fuck is up with that shit?”.

Some guy died the other day whilst attempting a drunken plank on the balcony of his high rise in Aussie. Despite it being quite the tragic event it has had a predictable flow on effect; now every ones doing it because there’s nothing quite like the chance of accidental death to make something lame seem that much more edgy.

Now it occurs to me that ‘planking’ is only a few letters away from ‘wanking’ which is something we did a lot of when we were kids and although no one took photos and posted them on the interweb, I know we had a lot more fun.

But the similarities don’t end there, oh no. If you’re a planker, then you have uncanny resemblance to being a wanker, which is the last thing any of us wanted to look like back in the day just in case someone cottoned on to the fact that we actually were.

So there you have it then, myth confirmed; wanking is ultimate more satisfying than planking.

One for the plankers...

...and one for the wankers.