Who Violated Who Facebook?!

I suffered the infamy this week of having Facebook remove my profile picture. I feel so dirty and violated.

Apparently a man can’t even show some back, crack and sack these days without someone taking an offence. Whether it was that someone complained or that Facebook simply came across it I shall never know. I suppose they have searches running for these things but I cringe at what they must have had as the search definitions if that was the case.

Maybe it was a spurned ‘friend’ that dobbed me in. I tried to think about the last one I declined and I’m pretty sure it was the request from Jesus. Damn him and his omnipresence.

So now I’m torn between wanting to push the envelope and post another dodgy pic, or just post nothing in protest. It might be a complete waste of space and serve no real purpose in the grand scheme of things, but I wouldn’t want to be the only guy you’ve even known to be kicked off Facebook. My mate Veins was but to be honest, if any one individual was likely to be kicked off a social networking site then Vinnie is that guy.

Our Lillian has just discovered the pros and cons of the ‘ol FB and was quite possibly the last person on earth to do so. Apart from George Clooney that is, who has declared that he will never ever have a page. What a guy. I bet he’s on their every night under some pseudonym perving at young girls along with the rest of us.

But unlike George, Lillian is suffering from that inability to say ‘no’ to every bugger who asks to be his friend just as we all did when we first signed up. Now he’s torn between not wanting to piss off work colleagues he hardly even talks to during the day and long lost buddies who some 500 plus ‘friends’ later seem to have just been waiting for the day he signed up.

Maybe it was he that dobbed me in, or maybe it was my angelic, twenty something, Greek goddess of a mate who laughed when I told her what had happened and declared that her profile would no longer look like she had some dodgy old guy stalking her. Well...the thumbnail may change but the truth will still be the truth XTina!

So now I’m putting Facebook on notice, because from here on in I’ll be wasting their time by flagging anything I find as only even slightly dodge as offensive. Babies in the bath? Paedophilia. Booze hags bearing their under carriage because they’ve fallen over in a drunken stupor? Porn. Munters doing the finger in every single photo trying to look ‘right hard’? Hate incitement. My mate breast feeding? Well, that one’s okay. I might have to check it again a couple of times just to make sure though...

Oh well. What do I give a fark, it wasn’t a real picture of me anyway. But it was bloody funny...

Does my mullet look big in this...?

Top Models Or Christian Rock? Tough Choice.

Moral dilemma. I think I downloaded a Christian track onto the 'ol iPod. Bummer. I had seen the band on TV and liked their sound, looked them up on Wankipedia and after sampling a few thirty second sound bites on iTunes, downloaded their two most popular songs. The suspect song is a catchy little number and sure, it has a lot of 'oh lords' in it and verses about 'showing me the way', but I thought it was a song about breaking up. On closer listening I think it’s about finding Jesus.

So now what do I do? Keep them and just hope anyone listening to my playlist in the car doesn't take me for a paid up member of the God squad, or just continue to rock out with my cock out and enjoy the ride? They wouldn't be the first band to suck me in with their catchy riffs and not too subtle words of worship but then I’ve always thought Phil Collins wrote the book of Genesis, so I’m easy pickings. Maybe I'll download their whole damn album in the hope that it will give me the knowledge I need to pass myself off as a true believer next time I try to gatecrash the Parachute music festival, where all the hot teenage girls all wear promise rings but believe that 'oral is moral'.

Am I only the one who thinks that current Labour Party leader, Phil Goff, looks a lot like the former leader, Helen Clarke? People always thought Aunty Helen was a bit mannish and lets be honest here, we haven't seen the two of them in the same room together for sometime, so there you go. I feel as sure about this as I do that it would be more interesting if He-Man called himself the Master-bator of the Universe. He's clearly got the arms to prove it. He must use both too...

Not nearly as surprising are reality TV programs and the predictable initial elimination and selection episodes. If watching this rubbish has taught me anything, it’s that to guarantee your passage through the early stages you should stand out like a stiffy in bike shorts.

This is particularly true on anything where looks are the focal point of the show, like New Zealand’s Next Top Model, our version of the American show of the same name. Now the makers of shows like this have two options; pick all the pretty girls or pick most of the pretty girls and through in a few fruit cakes for dramatic effect. They will never ever go with the first option because lets face it, a pretty girl is a pretty girl and sure, she looks magic amongst a bunch of munters, but put her amongst a group of other similarly pretty girls and they all look alike. Unfortunately that makes for a very boring hour of TV unless you if you're a teenager who's discovered the wonder that is 'the wank'. Then it’s a rope burn hour of TV.

These 'interesting' girls are almost always not as pretty, but that doesn't matter. The producers of the show hope by mixing in the kooky girls with the attractive girls will lead to fireworks and they're not wrong. The damaged girls resent the pretty girls for being so damn hot and the pretty girls resent the damaged girls for being the mingers in what essentially is a beauty pageant. Eventually the mutual dislike reaches a level where it's not so subtle and shit hits a new level; the scrubbers will get their backs up over the beauty queens questioning their competing in a competition about who’s the prettiest, whilst the Paris Hiltons will feel that the Lindsay Lohans are using their baggage to get ahead.

Compelling stuff alright, but not groundbreaking. This kind of carry on between the differing factions of girls has gone on since ages ago and life as a girly is not all about pyjama parties, pillow fights and shaving each others legs. Its not, but oh how we fellas wish it was.

So sure enough, when faced with the need to cull 30 wannabes down to 12 probable’s you just knew the African refugee girl was going to make the final cut, as was the girl with the career threatening physical illness and the girl whose parents murdered each other over just where to hang the tea towel. Or something like that. Hardly a short listing that is indicative of anything that would happen in real life, but then this kind of product placement is not just restricted to model searches. On Dancing with the Stars there is always an overweight celebrity, not that there is anything wrong with being an overweight celebrity, especially as the population is getting fatter with every passing minute, but why not have ten fatties and two lookers?

I know why and you know why. Nobody wants to watch fatties, not even fatties. They might have their place in obstacle course type shows but that’s about it. Think about all the shows on TV right now that star fatties and they're all about one thing; them losing weight. Why are there no shows about skinny bastards like me getting fat? Why are there no shows about she males like Aunty Goff, or cartoons about ambidextrous intergalactic wankers?

No wonder I've started to listen to Christian rock, there’s nothing worth watching on TV.

Why Seedy Santa Only Comes Once A Year

I've come to realise as an adult just why it is that Christmas comes only once a year; because it's a mission and a half to put up freakin Christmas trees!

I did ours the other night and I haven't been that ball deep in foliage sweating like a rapist since ‘Nam. Which I've had a few flashbacks to recently but then I always do this time of the year what with the high humidity, the hot nights and lots of Asian students about, all of whom I strongly suspect of having a hand grenade or AK47 concealed on their persons.

Why just the other day DougalMac and I were enjoying each others metro sexual company down at the lagoon and I was reminded of a similar idyllic setting we had encountered in Da Nang in '68. We'd come across a water hole amongst the hills and had taken to bathing. There we all stood, soaping each others backs all the while hoping that whoever held our single bar of soap didn't drop it, when out of the reeds snaked an advanced patrol of VC.

Quite why they didn't open up on us there and then has always been a mystery to us but we'd like to believe it was because that even they, with their narrow little eyes and communistic ideals, were moved by the poignancy of several hardened men taking the time to gently soap each other in a brief reprise from the madness of war.

Either that or they were awestruck by the length and girth of Lancey's M60 – and I don’t mean the one he'd left on the bank besides the pool.

Yep, someone was watching over us that day. Perhaps it was 'ol HeyZuez himself. He's the reason we have a Christmas after all, not that we should joke about it like Tui did last week with yet another of their billboards. Despite the harmless humour of it all - and it was one of the funnier Tui efforts in quite some time - somebody complained about it. That somebody was a Christian, proving yet again that a small religious minority in this country can't handle the jandal, quite possibly because they know that we know that their religion is a sham.

Not that complaining about Christmas is restricted to Jesus and his home boys, some folk have decided they don't like the giant Santa that has stood in central Auckland for the last 50 years because he has a long crooked index finger, which makes him look ‘seedy’. Now let’s get one thing straight, if he was bumming Rudolph whilst a topless Mrs Claus watches on then it could be claimed he was ‘seedy’, but a crooked finger...

Don’t you sometimes wish Christmas could be like it was when you were a kid with no responsibilities? My grandparents lived in an old Victorian house with ceilings as high as a P addict and every year Granddad would get in a real tree that only just fitted in the room. That sucker - the tree, not Granddad - would soon be covered in decorations, candy canes and so many lights that half the town had to sit in darkness whenever we switched them on. It seems over the top now - says the guy who just struggled to erect a 5 foot plastic tree from China - but that is what people did back in the day.

They didn’t do shopping malls packed to the brim though. Apparently Christmas shopping means only one thing at this time of the year; hard out five fingered discount time as professional shop lifters hit the shops en masse. Who knew there was such a thing aye? I mean we were good back in my College days but we would never have called ourselves ‘professionals’ but we would've practiced more if we knew we could make a career out of it!

I remember once spending almost an hour in Toy World once waiting to pinch as many G.I.Joes as my mate Brent’s bomber jacket would hold. I made like I was buying them for my little brother and even went to go so far as to joke with the owner that ‘they all look the same to me haha’. The fuck they did. I was hard core and I knew what I wanted and the moment the guy went out the back to check something I had more plastic down my pants than a lezzo with a strap on.

It almost went pear shaped though. No sooner had I got out the door than those Joes not tucked into my pants fell out the arse of Brent’s jacket and onto the pavement. Luckily the stores window display shielded me from view and I was able to kick them out of sight of the shop before picking them up and legging it all the way down the main street. I must’ve made quite the sight; a pubescent boy in an over sized jacket running down the street with G.I.Joes in hand and a small erection.

Now that’s seedy.