Wankers of the Week

My dear old Grandad used to have a saying “Why is it when you need a hand you always get a van load of wankers showing up?”



And he was right. This week a wanker’s wagon showed up at the doors of ClubDes and quite rightly we’ve told them to step off, bitch.



Sonny Bill Williams



After all the palaver about signing the guy the NZRFU have now learned he doesn’t even want to stay in NZ after the World Cup. What a wanker. We don’t even give a shit about rugby really but even we know a peen-arse when we see one. Still, it’s not like the guy hasn’t got form on this sort of thing is it; Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs anyone?



Terry ‘El Tel’ Serepisos



On the verge of bankruptcy, again and yet still swanning around like some Teflon Don who happens to own a football club. Yes he’s done a lot for football in Welly and yes, we respect that, but do us all a favour Tel and do something about that house of cards your finances are built on brother. Just because the rest of the worlds high profile football club owners are fiddling the books big time doesn’t mean you have to be a right wanker like them.



The ‘Showbiz Editor’



What a wanker. Nuff said. Actually we do have a live chat question: Seeing as you scored that 50 year old woman who used to host Good Morning just so you could get a five minute segment, did you do the same at the newspaper? And supplementary question: Wasn't he a fella?

Dan, The 'Showbiz Editor'.

It’s funny how you remember some people.

You might have seen / heard the kerfuffle around the News of the World crashing and burning this week after it’s come to light they hacked a whole bunch of cell phones in the UK including that of a murdered girl. The fuckers.

So sensing a shit storm, Rupert Murdoch shut the whole paper down. It was a spectacular move and a spectacular story, even here in NZ and naturally our media did what they always do when something actually newsworthy i.e. Not the Harry Potter movie premiere, happens. They try to find ‘the NZ angle’.

And this one was easy because the News of the World has a NZ staff member, Dan. We’ll call him Dan because that’s his name. Not his full name you might have noticed but as he strikes me as the kind of cat to Google himself, regularly, I won’t use his last name.

He’s the papers’ Showbiz Editor. No really, there is actually such a position. It’s an oxymoron really because ‘showbiz’ is not really news; it’s scripted, planned and marketed. In fact it’s about as un-newsworthy as it gets so it’s a bit of a fucken stretch I think to describe the guy as a ‘journalist’ like all our media are.

Incidentally I always wanted to be a journalist but two things stopped me really a) that the prospect of four years study when I’d only just flunked college was not appealing and b) I thought I knew it all anyway. Still do.

My dearly departed Grandad was forever offering to pay for me too. He also regularly dropped the knowledge on me that I should learn Japanese and get into the tourism biz. Coming from a man who fought the buggers for 3 long years and still trusted none of them 50 years on, it was an admission of sorts that the bastards had won out, eventually.

Anyhoo. Dan was on the telly too, with his faux English accent that started out all hoighty toighty but quickly denigrated into colloquial Kiwi the madder he got at having just been left without a job. Given that he’s only been in the UK for about five years I thought it was the height of wankiness that he tried the accent on in the first place.

See, I’ve known of Dan for quite a while. He used to write a daily piece in the Dominion that was one of those ones that you just know he must’ve sucked some cock to get the column space because it contained no journalistic merit at all.

His crowning glory came the day he decided to poke fun at the masses who wore sneakers with their work clothes when hiking up Featherston Street from the train station. He thought he was being insightful and witty, everyone else just thought he was being a douche. Needless to say the complaints poured in.

I remember it so well because it was one of those times in my life I read his rubbish and regret that I had never taken Grandad up on his offer on the journalism. How Dan went from criticising peoples comfort to ‘Showbiz Editor’ I don’t know but again, I suspect it involves a lot of penis.

Oh and don’t feel too sorry for Dan, he reckons he’ll find a new job real easy because he’s on “a lot of TV and radio” and he’s “one of the most recognised faces in the showbiz industry”. His words not mine. See what I mean about him being a big self Googler?

Yes it’s funny how you remember some people.

Sienna had her cell phone hacked.

Just Ask Colin

Colin Meads, bless him, seems to be the authority on everything these days doesn’t he?

He’s the go to guy on the topical questions of the day, he really is. How to best deal with angry parents on rugby sidelines? Ask Colin. And what about the kids playing, how will it affect them? Colin will know. Change the silver fern to red for the Rugby World Cup? Let’s run it by Colin first.

Now I know the man is a living legend and made quite the impression back when Kiwi men were men and the rest of the part time, skinny, white guys playing rugby were nervous, but it’s all a bit like asking Grandad what he thinks of the Japs 66 years on from WWII; the answer is never going to change.

Yet still we keep asking. Maybe that’s why we keep asking? Because we know we’ll get a meat and veg answer. But good on him, here’s a man who at the ripe old age of 74, still works the farm at Te Kuiti, drinking his deer jizz supplement or whatever it is that keeps him young and yet still has the time to churn out words of wisdom from a simpler time.

What a legend.

Oh and my solution to the angry parents on the sideline thing? Arm the match officials. Lets us then see how mouthy Captain Hardout on the touchline is likely to be when the ref is brandishing a yellow card, a red card and a Glock.

Shit ‘em right up.

Colin and friends, in simpler times.

The New Black (Man).

Let’s lighten the mood a little and talk about terrorism.

Terrorism is the new ‘black man’ in terms of being the best panic making phrase, particularly in the States, but even over here in little ol’ New Zealand, the country that no bugger would want to blow up.

That’s not to say we don’t have things worth blowing up. Wainui for example, would be a good start. Maybe even Dave Dobbyn because you know and I know for every ‘anthem’ he’s written there are two or three annoying as fuck numbers he’s also penned...

During the mid to late eighties there was the populist notion that most of the crime being committed in the States was being done so by ‘a black man’. Every time someone reported the suspect for a misdemeanour matched that particular description the hysteria got whipped just a little bit more.

Terrorism has reached that same absurd level and like just about everything, we are in a rush to prove we’re not immune to the same perceived invisible risk as everyone else. Why just last month a ‘mysterious package’ was discovered on someone’s desk at The Beehive.

It had written on it that it was a bomb, but apparently that wasn’t clear enough. The package remained a mystery until it was found to contain flies, of the cluster variety, which, admittedly, are extremely concerning if you’re rotting caribou, but not so much if you’re the PM. Or so I would have thought.

Why even today as I write this a mysterious device was found in a suspicious vehicle, which really sets two out of three alarm bells ringing doesn’t it? Imagine if that same vehicle was being driven by a black man then the shit really would have hit the fan. Fuck me.

Up and down the country old ladies are peering out their windows, phone in hand, finger poised over the 1 key - which they've already pushed twice - just waiting for the next black man they see driving a suspicous vehicle to go past....

Where has all this paranoia about bombs and terrorism come from?! When was the last time any bugger blew up anything of note in this country and at what point did we stop treating cars and briefcases and wrapped up boxes with ‘bomb’ written on them as anything but the obvious?

It’s at times like these I apply the ‘What would Grandad have done in the same situation?’ rule of logic because it seldom fails me.

Had he seen a car acting suspiciously – or rather the shifty bugger driving it – he would have gone over, tapped on the driver’s window and told him to piss off. He would have kept the briefcase and tossed it in the shed never to be of use, ever. And after laughing at the absurdity of the package having ‘bomb’ written on it, would stick his pocket knife in it to see if it really was an explosive device.

But that would be too easy wouldn’t it? Sure, bombs going off in Kabal and other such exotic destinations are grim and no laughing matter, but that doesn’t mean we have to start running around like a bunch of dicks every time someone forgets their briefcase whilst on lunch, or parks their rust bucket in an upmarket area.

And if someone is really serious about blowing something the fuck up are they going to write ‘bomb’ on the bloody thing? No. No they are not.

Terrorism; It’s the new black man.

An Ode To A Great Man

I had a dose of reality this week with the passing of my Grandfather, aged 88. Thankfully it wasn’t a sudden thing and sadly, had been on the cards for some time.

Granddad was a tough old bugger. He was cut from cloth that we Metrosexuals would consider too harsh for our delicate skin and yet sadly, despite having a hide tougher than chainmail, it was skin cancer that killed him. All those years he spent outside in the hot Hawke’s Bay sun, slaying dragons and building castles from the ground up, came back to bite him on the arse. I always remember him as wearing a hat but the damage was probably done well before then it would seem.

In writing a eulogy for him it struck me just how extra ordinary his life and others of his generation was. Quite rightly by the time I’d finished I felt like a little girl and proceeded to cry myself to sleep that night.

He spent six consecutive years away at war with the New Zealand Navy. Six years! Imagine walking out the door tomorrow and not returning to your families for that period of time. And here I was thinking that the three tours I did of ‘Nam was impressive. How many of us can honestly say we have done anything for six years by choice, like lived in the same house, stayed in the same job or shagged the same bird?

Even if you have, now imagine spending a good part of that period bricking it in the fear of being shelled or torpedoed by the Hun, or kamikazed by the nut bar Japs. He was torpedo actually, very early in his naval career and not only did he live to tell the tale but to serve four more years helping to liberate the Pacific from the rice rollers. Oh how he must have enjoyed seeing the proliferation of sushi bars around the place now, after all that sacrifice....

After the war, he, like so many others, shunned the attraction of the big cities and returned to his rural hometown where he would spend the next fifty years building it up to be more than just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it you would pass through on your way to somewhere else.

He wasn’t the type of guy to be worried about keeping up with the Jones’s like so very many of us are these days. In fact he would be more inclined to help the Jones’s build their place up before he even thought of touching his and even then he’d be moving on to the Jones’s neighbours in between, to help with theirs.

It drove my Grandmother mad that it was community first; home second with him but that was just how he was. Incidentally they were married for 55 years, another milestone that you and I are going to be hard pressed to match with our achievements when the time comes. The closest we’ll come to being anything for 55 years is having been completely sucked in by the rampant consumerism that would have peed its pants in fear, if faced by a man like my Granddad in his prime.

Admittedly they spent the last 20 years in separate beds and separate rooms but still, that’s a lifetime to be putting up with someone else’s shit. These days we struggle to give it five minutes before we’re on the internet looking for someone else, or porn, to help alleviate our swollen testicles which have expanded to watermelon size in that time.

Granddad would not have been much of a fan of the internet, especially Google. Back in his day if he’d have asked too many questions he would’ve been beaten with a stick for being so bloody nosey. Back then you learnt by doing, not by wanting to know the answer to everything all the time. As for my blogging, well, he’d probably tell me that he went to war, it was grim, but he didn’t need to write a novel about it.

He was the only guy I’ve ever known to come back from the town tip with more than when he left. Sometimes I wondered if the character Del Boy from the TV show Only Fools and Horses was based on him because he was always arriving home with a thousand of something he had just managed to procure with some fantastic barter. He always had a plan for the steal of the century too but not surprisingly we came across the bulk of them the other night, still in his shed and still without a use.

Like most Granddads he was a great man. A very different man than you and I could ever be but yet he taught me more than any one single person ever will again. Like never trust the Japs.

I shall miss him.