An Ode to TBag - Last of the Retro Dressers

Sad days round these parts last week with the leaving of one Tim ‘T-Bag’ Borlase, the last of the retro dressers.

The origins of our hirsute hero are shrouded in secrecy, half truths and a Cold Chisel soundtrack. We first met back in ‘Nam where I came across the young T Bag fishing whilst nude. He claimed it made him one with the water and although others thought it made him look crazy I could see his nuts and it didn’t bother me one bit. That’s where he got his nickname, incidentally.

But then the waters around Nam were warm and moist, just like the jungle. I didn’t know it then but it wouldn’t be the first time I caught him naked around fish. Perhaps it was the war, perhaps it was a fetish, who really knows but even in the middle of a war zone the guy loved to fish and still does. If he’s not actually fishing then he’s either watching programmes or reading magazines, about fishing.

Ironic then that he should be on his way to Canada where the salmon are nervous and the beer is like making love in a boat; fucking close to water.

In some parts of that country they speak French. Celine Dion is from Canada. She speaks French and English but lets face it, she sounds awful in either language. Wolverine is from Canada too and although he is a borderline feral personality with six razor sharp claws that pop out of his hands at will, I’d rather meet him quite frankly. Sadly he’s a fictional comic book character, so no real chance there. Dion on the other hand is very real *shiver*.

Once, in a tender moment shared in a communal warm shower, TBag revealed to me that he had grown up on the very square streets of Palmerston North. A little known fact about Palmy is that it has NZ's highest population of ugly people, a fact confirmed to me one time by the missus who had the misfortune to be ’out on the town’ there one night.

I had a mate called Palmy once. He was a wanker.

It was there that Timmo developed his appreciation of all things passion wagon. He covets a good wagon did our TBag and as a four doors and a hatch man myself, I respect that. But then who wouldn’t really because wagons are the original all purpose vehicle; kids, pets, groceries, sports equipment, firewood, dogging…the wagon has it all covered.

We have two such fine specimens at The Club, aptly named Passion Wagons Mk 1 and 2. Mk1 is made by Hyundai and crafted from hardened Korean steel, just like the huge, globe circling ships they build. Despite knowing this I do have a nagging suspicion it will crumple like a potato chip were we involved in a collision tomorrow, but then it is built for speed with no electrics and no such luxuries as side impact airbags.

Mk2 is a Mazda which for some reasons Americans pronounce the same way they do ‘asthma’, like a kid with a lisp. It’s from the country that gave us Ninjas, The Kamikaze and guys who like to kill blonde European girls and hide their bodies in a bathtub full of sand on their balcony. It too is built for speed, has all the electrics and airbags you could want, but yet is currently sounding like a World War One biplane as it attempts to start each morning. Bloody electrics.

Anyhoo, our Timmo has made like a Christian and pulled out which leaves us with a void where once there was a good looking guy in flared trousers and a bomber jacket with WWF badges on his sleeve.

It’s only been a week but just like Nam the withdrawal symptoms have kicked in, so much so I found myself watching a fishing show on TV whilst rocking back and forth in the foetal position. It was that one with the guy in the wheelchair, who seems very nice, but a small part of me does want to see what happens if he were to accidentally roll off the end of the boat at some point…

So farewell Timmo. Our gain is Canada’s loss, or something like that. And hey, never forget what that wise old VC bugger in Tan Son Nhut said to us that time we captured him:

“Ông đã đi ngủ với một gã ăn mày ngứa, tỉnh dậy với một ngón tay có mùi”

TBag and one of his passion wagons. That's not a blue cod in his pocket either...

Envy - It Makes A Man Do Strange Things

Isn't the innocence of children great? I can tell my ten year old son that I've left him a little something in the kitchen i.e a fart and he'll go in to check what it is each and every time. Someday that gullibility will be gone forever and I shall have to get my kicks from letting out a silent one whilst we all sit around watching TV. Ah, who am I kidding, I do that now anyway.

I was sitting at the lights today admiring a big shiny HSV across the intersection until I noticed the driver pick his nose and eat it. Which I thought probably says a lot about owners of big shiny, attention getting cars, but it didn't half leave me feeling quite good, sitting their in my modest passion wagon, made from the finest Korean steel and in which I have never picked my nose and eaten it.

I love cars as much as the next guy who hopes that driving a big flash car will somehow influence people’s perception of his penis size. Which not so long ago was probably the case, but in these tumultuous times where petrol prices are through the roof and with global warming upon us, those drivers of big flash gas guzzlers are alas more likely to be considered by all to have a small dick, not a big one. Why not try shaving it fellas, that always makes it look bigger.

I do like cars. Not in a 'rub my bits against it' Mecaphilliac kind of way, but I admire a good looking motor. If I was being completely honest I might admit to cracking the smallest of chubbies when around an Audi R8 with all the bells and whistles, or a BMW M3, but that’s about it. I'm not going to go out and buy the jacket and matching cap or nothing. I do find myself admiring classics more though these days, particularly muscle cars but then I've always had a thing for The General Lee (a Dodge Charger) and if I had more money than sense I'd be cruising around in one quicker than you can fantasise about Jessica Simpson playing Daisy Duke..

Which leads me to make this other stark confession; the other day my wife put Solid Gold on the radio and guess what? I didn't change it. Classic cars and classic music, I think I'm turning into my Dad. Which is bad news for my boy because my old man left the country when I was about ten and I've never seen, nor heard from him since. I do know where and how he is, courtesy of an uncle, but even he struggles to get any info out of a marriage so locked down to outside contact you'd think my father had married Tom Cruise. Maybe he has. Maybe whilst I was off becoming a man he became a woman, Katie Holmes to be precise. And to think I was turned on by seeing her milkers in 'The Gift'.

I admire dudes who paint their own cars. It must be incredibly liberating to give your motor a paint job that is distinctly un-factory, like the camo job on the old Escort down the main road. Or the classic Holden with the bench seats that does the local rounds, it has an Aboriginal paint job that I know full well could not have been completed in such fine detail without the aide of several large spliffs.

But that's car envy for you. The penultimate stage for a fella in a lifetime full of envy. The final stage is young girl envy, which kicks in about now I think. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking the good looking girl at work should be my PA for no other reason than looks. I don’t need a PA but having one – especially a looker – would make me the envy of all the other fellas in the office.

Envy starts when you're young with something innocuous, like cricket bats. My mate Willie G was always wielding the flashest, shiniest, newest Gray Nicholls bat and man did it give me the shits. Figuratively speaking of course, it's not like we were ever doing anything with cricket bats that would physically give me diarrhoea. How he ever afforded them I never did quite figure out because his family had less money than mine but his parents were always the kind to put their kids wants first. I admire that greatly now but oh how I hated them for it back then.

I must have penned several dastardly plots to pinch Willies bats but even the best sand and repaint job was never going to mask a stolen bit of willow, not when we played for hours on end every day at the local park. So I made do like everyone else and enjoyed my turn with it when it came and to Willie's credit, he always gave you a turn with it. The jammy bastard.

The closest I ever came to getting my hands on my own sparkling Grey Nicholls was when I arranged for my mate and then local gang banger Rob to grab one in a smash and grab on the front window of the local Sterling Sports. To his credit he did get it, but subsequently used it in helping break the glass in a few more smash and grabs that night so it wasn't so sparkling when eventually I received it.

Still, I looked the business standing at the crease with it and that was all I was really after. And not once, no matter how great I thought I was or how cool I looked, did I ever pick my nose and eat it.

Good Times In The Gold Coast - Part Two

Australia is a big place. It has big motorways packed with big cars driven by big wankers. We weren’t surprised to hear on the wireless whilst driving around that Gold Coast drivers were found to be the worst in Australia. My wife ran a red shortly after just to add to the statistics.

The speed limit on most of the open motorway is 110kmh, which means that every guy who fancies himself as the next Peter Brock – which is half the male population and that’s being conservative – drives it at 130kmh. You may recall that the legendary Brocky died after wrapping his race car around a tree, I think the Gold Coast highways could do with a few strategically placed trees actually, do us all a favour.

There’s a lot of money to be made on the Gold Coast it would seem, no doubt in commercial property and mostly by fat Middle Eastern men, all of whom seem to drive very expensive European cars. There were so many it seemed almost as every second car was German and that’s no small thing given you’re in a country that loves it Holden’s and Fords. If you measured the place just by the cars on show at any given point in time, you could even be forgiven for thinking that maybe you were in Germany. Unfortunately it’s Kath & Kim accents that ring out around the place and not that manly German one that all Krauts, including the women, have.

It wasn’t all a car show though. Amongst all the chrome of the Mercs, the Beemers and the Audis and away from the grunt and muscle of the Holdens and Fords there are some right shit heaps doing the rounds. Driven mostly by guys who cultivate that ‘just got out of bed / the surf / my mate’s buttocks look’. Driving a death trap on wheels just adds to the charm of just such a guy I suppose, it makes him ‘edgy’.

I was surprised to see whilst at Dreamworld that a large Arab contingent had been let in. Only because Australians seem to be as paranoid about terrorism as the Yanks are. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that burqas were on the list of banned items on the rides right alongside cameras and cellphones, but they weren't. It certainly confused the hell out of the Asian tourists though; they didn’t know whether they should take photos or run and hide.

There was no such hesitation from the group I witnessed at Movie World, who all posed for photos with a little Aussie toddler who had no idea what was going on other than she was getting a whole lot of cuddles from strangers. I was going to try the same thing but somehow I don’t think I would have gotten away with it quite as successfully. I tried flogging off my son for a few pics to the same group of tourists, promising him at least half of the ten bucks I planned to charge the Asians per cuddle, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Speaking of the Vietcong; all the sightseeing choppers that buzz the beaches in Surfers took me back a few years, to the four day weekend that Dougs, Lancey, Big Al and I had off down Long Dik Dong way in ’69. It had been several weeks since any of us had been near civilisation, let alone fresh water and I remember endless hours spent bathing and frolicking together in the sea, nude, whilst the Air Cav boys flew recon missions over the tree line in their Iroquois choppers all day long. We’d finish off the day trying to make a gymnastics pyramid on each others bare backs whilst the sun went down. War does strange things to a man, but that was not one of them.

One of the rich Middle Eastern guys I mentioned actually lived one floor above us in our hotel. His apartment was directly opposite us and the two young concubines he had living with him would spend most of the day out on the balcony sunning their ridiculous trim and taught figures till the sun went down. It made doing anything in the kitchen damn difficult because it was the closest vantage point and I was forced to stare at them the whole time. My wife thought I had prostate issues the whole trip because I always had to run off to the toilet wherever we went, when really it was on account of all the tea I was making whilst back in the apartment.

We bumped into Fat Tony and one of his hand maidens in the foyer one morning. She was pretty enough to be a waitress and he was oozing something, possibly cold hard cash, but whatever it was it wasn’t the ‘just got out of bed’ look that's for sure.

Ah Australia, the land of opportunity. Just leave your conscience at the door.

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.

When Car Ads Go Bad - Epilogue

My reply email from Ford NZ arrived the other day. I had written to them expressing the opinion that they were being a bunch of dicks in getting so worked up over the LTNZ ad.

Predictably, it was all very formal and waxed on about just how much Ford puts into road safety in NZ. And as I read the first few paragraphs I could just tell that the writer was gagging to say "our cars don't crash" and sure enough, about three paragraphs in, there it was. Strictly in marketing speak mind you, because the bullshit never stops when you're trying to sell something. More so when that something was just made out to be as fallible as the competition.

So I rest my case. Mind you, if there's one thing I like more than being right, it's proving pricks are wrong and I'm tempted to go take a Ford for a test spin and drive it off the nearest cliff just to prove a point.

But that will never happen, because their cars don't crash.

When Car Ads Go Bad

Here's a little something that left me a wee bit moist this week. Ford NZ have chucked a spaz because the latest road safety ad features one of their cars skidding off the road and down a bank.

Obviously the marketing guys at Ford shit themselves upon seeing it for the first time, they thought their worst fears had been realised – someone had leaked the out takes of their last ad campaign to the media. When they realised that it wasn’t they went into what promotions people always do in a panic situation, they initiated full bullshit mode.

The poor sheila who was obviously out of the room when they had the ‘so who’s going to front up to the media with this crap’ vote, spent several minutes on last nights television news pointing out that thanks to the anti-dandruff-traction-stabiliser thingee that comes as standard on all new Fords, this accident would never happen and therefore the advertisement mis-represented them unfairly. They had, she pointed out almost believably, received several calls from concerned Ford owners.

Really? Several calls you say? I would like to know what these owners called about. It’s a pretty sad day when after seeing an ad on TV you decided to call the manufacturer of your car. A product recall due to spontaneous combustion might do that, but a road safety ad? More importantly I would like to know how they knew the number to ring. These are the same organisations that are notoriously impossible get a hold of when you’re looking to lay a claim after your car spontaneously exploded into a ball of flames and yet, on a lazy Sunday night, several frantic people were able to contact them and express their concerns that the car in the ad looked a little like theirs? I don’t think so Ford.

Let’s read between the lines here. What Ford is trying to tell us is they don’t think that their cars crash and therefore we should excuse them from contributing to road safety. They forget that the weakest link in all this is the driver. Yes, the technology that goes into car safety has come a long way but as yet, no braniac has yet invented a system that fully negates the unpredictably of the munter behind the wheel.

I put car manufacturers right up there in this lack of moral responsibility they exhibit with tobacco companies, McDonalds, the oil companies and the guy at our cafeteria who put onions in my mate Big Gay Rays ham, cheese and pineapple toasty. He didn’t have any pineapple, so he figured onion would be a good substitute. By the way, Ray’s not actually gay. He says he’s only in it for the bumfun.

Here’s where a car company like Ford has the average munter fooled. They make fast powerful machines and market them as super cars that will never fail you. They make ads where the very relaxed, fresh from a colonic Joe Average driver throws his car around mountainous S bends like he just don’t care. Now the law says that they have to show a disclaimer in their ads and they do, but they make it as tiny and as blurry as legally possible so you can’t see it. It reads something like this:

“This ad was made on a closed road that our professionally trained driver of several years experience had 64 days to practice on. We worked out before hand just what we needed to do in order not to fuck it up. Joe actually drove this stretch of road 43 times and never once did he get out of first gear thanks to maintaining the 10kmh speed restriction recommended by our stunt co-ordinators. Then we fast forwarded the whole thing to make it look like he was doing a 110kmh. Enjoy your 60K metal casket, dumbass.”

And they have the gall to pack a sulk over an ad that features an unbranded model of theirs in a road safety campaign?! Will they lose sales over it? I doubt it. I suspect that the guy who traditionally buys this type of Ford doesn’t actually pay any attention to any road safety ad. He’s far too busy rushing to make his next colonic. And after all, she’ll be right.

Ever notice how the owners of Fords and Holden’s tend to be fat buggers? I’m not one to unfairly generalise, but think about it next time you see one puffing his way from out behind the wheel in a car park. I often wonder, did he get fat by working at a desk job all these years to make enough money to buy the thing? Or did he buy it because he needs the power to transport his weight around? Does he in fact have a tiny chopper? Both my neighbours own one and yes, both are big individuals. One dude is a lady though so it can’t be a case of penile dwarfism, although she is a bit mannish and I have my suspicions.

Ford New Zealand, proud to be behind the All Blacks, but not road safety. Nice one.

NB: Incidentally my mate Skids loves Fords, but he doesn’t actually own one. So you’re alright by me Marcus.

The fast and the furious.

If there’s one thing that gets my chopper hard – and not in a good way – it’s bad driving.

I know am not alone in this. Nearly everyone I know lists bad driving as one of their pet peeves. It sure does piss us off, but does anyone do anything about it? I do. I regularly contribute to the report a bad driver scheme that the NZ Police run through their website: www.police.govt.nz. It may not be much, but it’s a start.

All you need is the car rego and you are about three clicks away from anonymously dobbing the bastard in. Not totally anonymous, the Police will know who you are of course, but the dude with the mullet in the rust bucket that just flew past you doing a 130km on the motorway won’t! It's that easy, Try it sometime.

Here in NZ we have what we like to call, the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude. It’s a crap attitude, lets be honest. It might be quaint and cute and oh so Kiwi, but it’s the reason we don’t lock murderers and kiddie fiddlers away for nearly long enough. It’s the same reason we elect the same muppets every couple of years to spend our taxes on their tummy tuck operations and it’s the reason why other countries treat us with about as much respect as a floaty that just won’t flush.

The attitude works a little something like this – we don’t really care about something unless it directly affects us. So crime is cool, until some one steals my TV, then I’m really going to have something to say on the matter. Kiddie fiddling is not cool, but I don’t have any kids of my own so I needn’t worry about it (unless you’re doing the fiddling). Dangerous driving is okay, cause the hoon has just passed me, so I’m safe.

It’s a blase take on everything and the irony is, in some cases we even condone it by admiring those who get away with it. If it’s not a crime in our eyes, then is it really wrong? Of course it is, genius.

A large number of people don’t see dangerous driving as a crime and that is a big part of the problem. These people openly criticise the Police for putting resources into road safety , usually because they just got issued a ticket. These are the type of pricks that are of the opinion that it was okay to do what they were doing at the time, because they are more important than you and I. If there was any justice in the world it would be them that end up colliding with the drunk driver.

There are of course, other contributing factors too. For a small country, we are always trying to cover short distances in the shortest period of time. If we didn’t learn to drive from someone who was a bit shoddy behind the wheel themselves, then we learnt from the PlayStation. We mentally switch off when we get inside our two tonne pile of metal, thinking that we’re safe, because we know what we’re doing. No one else does, but hey - she’ll be right.

Then we turn on our iPods, crank up the sub woofers till the ears bleed and cocoon ourselves in a world of sensory deprivation. We buy big new powerful cars because the slick advertising promises us that we’ll have flaw proof handling and acceleration. These ads never mention that the wink link in all this sits behind the wheel. It also doesn’t help that once we have our license, never again are we tested on our abilities to handle a car. Especially the big new powerful one. Yeah, she'll be right.

We also have a binge drinking culture, which needless to say, doesn’t exactly help the issue. But more on that in a later blog methinks.

Here’s what I say to the ‘she’ll be right attitude’ to dangerous driving. Let’s collectively get down to the pharmacy of life and cash in our prescription for a set of testicles. Let’s get behind anybody or anything that makes it difficult for people to drive dangerously. Let’s have a culture where if some munter tailgates you on the motorway at 120km that it’s him that feels intimidated. Better yet, let’s vote for people who promise to pass legislation that makes a ‘citizens beating’ a legal form of speed reduction. I bet everyone will sit on 90 the day that law is passed because we’ll all be waiting to chase down anyone who drifts over a 100!

If we can collectively get behind fifteen blokes in short shorts chasing another fifteen blokes in short shorts then we can get behind a real cause. Don’t leave it for the overworked and under resourced Five-0, don’t leave it till someone you love is hurt / injured / killed. I'm just guessing here, but if that day ever happens (and I sincerely hope it doesn't), I'm picking she'll no longer be right. Right?

I don’t know about you, but given the choice between the two, I’d rather someone stole my TV than killed my loved ones in a car crash.