Weetbix, Telethon and Titties.

Whoever said that fibre was good for you clearly hadn’t eaten four weetbix a day, every day, for breakfast when they made that statement.

I have - and my sphincter is not thanking me for it. I told my mate at work about it the other day and he told me that he felt sorry for my toilet. Feel no pity for the carzie my friends, it is porcelain after all and quite frankly is built for this shit, literally. Unfortunately the soft pink tissue that makes up the rim of my anus is not. Infact, the term ‘ropeburn’ springs to mind.

Pink toilet paper never really caught on did it? No one minded having it on the roll so much I think, it was more the case that used pink toilet paper shows up a lot more easily when washed out to see than white. That aspect of it never really caught on at all the popular swim beaches that’s for sure.

Now I’ve been chowing down on NZs favourite breakfast – and how the fuck do they know, have they asked everybody? – on account of it’s Stat Attack trading card time again and as readers of this blog know, or the owners of kids can attest, they’re like gold up and down the playgrounds of Aotearoa. Honestly, the things I do for that boy of mine. My old man would never have been so forthcoming. He would have told me to stop being a bloody poof over some poofy cards and given me ten lashings across the bare buttocks with his leather belt just for good measure.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I continued to wet my bed well into my teens. It only finally stopped the day I landed in ‘Nam. You don’t dare wet your bed whilst in ‘Nam. Charlie can smell Caucasian urine a mile away, even closer if you ate asparagus the night before. And don’t even think about taking a dump whilst on patrol. You either hold that turtle head in till you get back to the firebase or you eat it whilst it’s warm. For many years even after I returned to civilisation I continued to drink my own whizz, not because I had to but just because I liked the taste. War does that to a man.

WeetBix have always been associated with trading cards. Remember how every pack back in the day had a couple from some series that you never ever had the chance of completing. By the time you got through the box and bought another, the 30 card set of World War Two fighter planes that you were really gagging to complete had long gone and you were forced into starting on some gay set of trains, castles or seabirds. I don’t think there actually ever was a complete set of World War Two fighter planes; it was all a ruse created to disappoint heterosexual boys.

Another blast from the past is making its way back in 2009 - Telethon! How good was Telethon aye? 48 hours of crazy, wacky, hi-jinks perpetuated by New Zealand’s own B, C and D grade celebrities mixed in with a few nobodies from overseas from shows you never really watched anyway. Throw in hourly performances from the local line dancing troupe, crochet club and that mute juggler from Cuba Mall and you really had the precursor to the TV show that has become NZ Has Got Talent.

If you were really lucky you got to stay up late and watch the really risqué stuff that happened when all those celebrities stopped drinking coffee to stay awake and turned to the top shelf booze to keep them ‘spontaneous’. It was only then that they’d shave off each others moustaches and play that lame game where you pass the piece of fruit around the room using your neck cause it made it look like you were giving each other a hicky. Man that was some wacky backy stuff wasn’t it?! Whew, good times.

Let’s face it, everything between the first and last hour of every Telethon was shit and its not going to hold up to today’s standard of entertainment unless it starts, continues and finishes with one main ingredient; Titties. Lots of them, preferably naked but I think most of us will take what we can get on whomever they can get. Actually titties are so good that I’m genuinely surprised we’re having a Telethon because I think they could quite possibly cure the cancer they’re going to try and raise money for.

This thought occurred to me the other day when far from there being thousands out in Auckland protesting the Boobs on Bikes parade, there were actually thousands out supporting it, taking every vantage point possible and all of them getting more of an eyeful than I ever did when I snuck a peak at the Page 3 girl in the Sunday paper Dad always used to buy along with a loaf of unsliced fresh bread.

Now if only Weetbix did a Tittie Attack series of collector’s cards……

Cold, Hard Trading Cards

It has been a few days since I last cracked a fat over anything but thankfully the wife I never had, DougalMougal, has made me see the error of my ways and reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility. Well he didn’t say that in so many words. Or any of those words actually, in fact I made that entire bit up.

I’ve actually been busy finishing the biggest bag of Twisties I’ve ever seen. No not really but actually that’s not so far from the truth. My son, ClubDes Junior, is collecting the rugby cards you find in the chippie packets these days and shit has been getting serious. I’ve eaten so many potato chips I now bleed when I poo. Those cards are playground currency I tell you and they’re more valuable than cold hard cash. The kids won’t even accept cash for them actually, the only legal tender they recognise is a 5cm square bit of plastic with some meathead on the front.

It wasn’t long before Junior soon became a Don of the playground with his mega collection, thanks to my pimping the crew at ClubDes for their cards from the packets they’ve been getting out of the vending machine in the hall. What started out as a harmless bit of helping out the boy though has quickly become a race to see whose kid can get the full set first between me and the Hard Out Harry parents of the Saffa he’s best mates with.

Initially their Mum was having none of it because her boys were ripping through the packets and not actually eating the chips and if there is one thing that rips the undies of a Saffa it’s wasted money, but as soon as she got a sniff of competition then shit really kicked off. Typical bloody Saffas. I wonder if they’ll consider a winner takes all competition to see whose cable contains the most chip fragments, theirs or mine.

All of this reminds me of my school days spent collecting trading cards. Back in my day you got bubblegum with your cards. It tasted like crap and lasted about all of four chews and was made from jandal cutoffs but we didn’t care because it was all about the cards. Batman, Ninja Turtles, WWF, Rugby League – you name it we collected it. The token Indian boy at my school, because there really weren’t that many back then, always got the whole set first because his Dad owned the local diary and he bought boxes of the stuff from wholesalers. You see that’s the secret to buying trading cards, as I would later learn whilst in the early days of my inauguration to the world of comic book shop geekdom, because each box is guaranteed to contain a full set plus rare cards.

There was no flogging rare shit off on Trade Me back then either, you begged, borrowed or stole your way to a whole set in those days and I stole anything that wasn’t tied down. I remember fleecing all the girls in 2nd form of their Neighbours cards, not because I collected them but just because I could. I was exempt from the suspicion of the theft too on account of being a fella and no fella would have been caught dead with Neighbours cards. Who collects Neighbours cards, I mean really? My sister did and she got the whole set too.

I reckon my violating of the girls collections stemmed from the fact that I had been burnt before with trading cards. Karma had paid me a visit earlier in ’86 when me and Willie Gee went halvsies in the Soccer World Cup collectors set. There were 52 playing cards to collect and through our collective resources we scored the lot, including the four very rare ace cards. Once we had the set we took turns in holding on to them for a week, laying them out, admiring them, that kind of thing. We were too young back then to know how to have a jimmy but you can bet if did we would have over them, they were that good.

Only they went missing onetime whilst on Willie’s watch and I never ever saw them again. It was very nearly the end of a beautiful friendship. They were good cards too dammit and I’d be living of the profits of having sold them cards today if I had them, not that I’d ever sell them. But they’d be my retirement plan. Willie lives up in the Coromandal these days cultivating the ganja. I bet he sold those cards for a bag of fertiliser or something. I got mine back in later years though when I pinched half his G.I.Joe collection.

Ah well. That’s life and you’ve just got to get on with things really. As I write this Junior only needs three cards to collect the set while Saffaboy needs only the one. It’s gonna be a close call. Maybe I should break into their house and steal his…