Save The Whale? Not This One...

Some people should be banned from owning computers. Like the guy who writes the Whale blubber – I mean oil – blog site.

According to Wikipedia he’s a ‘controversial NZ blogger’ but I challenge that description and in doing so I might be about to break the rule of some unwritten blogger's union by criticizing the guy, but I don’t give a fuck. I only belong to the one association; the Captain Awesome Union, membership of one. Me.

He’s in court this week for breaching suppression orders because he on his blog he ‘outs’ high profile people who get name suppression when they beat their wives or fiddle their kids. Now I support the principal that is naming and shaming these pricks, but sadly, there’s more to Whale Blubber than just the community service he likes to think he’s doing.

I’ve read his blog a couple of times and maybe it’s just me, but I could never work out who it was that he was trying to name anyway, which is surprising because I’m an intelligent man. He doesn’t actually name them as much as give you the clues so that you can figure it out i.e. a pictogram.

Perhaps therein lies my problem; I always have all the answers it’s just the questions that confuse me.

Aside from this fantastic public service that he does, or doesn’t do depending which way you look at it, he also indulges in the following; name calling, personal attacks, speculation on the penis size of those that disagree with him (which is a bit rich considering it’s probably been some time since he saw his own) and other such gems you’d expect from someone best describe as an ‘angry old man’.

In his trail this week it was revealed he suffers from clinical depression and takes medication. Sure, don’t we all. Earlier this year it was reported that he and his wife lost their family home after insurance payments for his depression were stopped by his insurer. It led to an emotional exchange of posts on the Blubber blog between him and his wife who clearly don’t actually talk to each other in person.

Who knew you could get paid for being a sad fuck aye? I sense a lifestyle change coming on.

It’s about now that I’m starting to get a bit bored of this whole sorry saga and as we all know boredom leads to porndom, but one look at this guy will soon solve that. He is the stereotypical look one would associate with a blogger and he gives us all a bad name, especially the ridiculously good looking ones like me*.

Apparently he has a job in the real world but that doesn’t stop him from blogging constantly. Fuck if I tried that carry on at my work I would be out on my arse but yet a little something like ‘job security’ probably doesn’t rate high on this guy’s give-a-fuck scale.

Here’s what I think. I think it’s easy to be an arsehole to lots of people and then hide behind the excuse that is clinical depression. I think it’s easy to be a political commentator when your father used to be the President of the National Party and tells you how and what to think.

I also think it’s easy to make like you’re some virtual vigilante when in fact you don’t really reveal anything so I reckon it’s time Whale Blubber got out from behind his PC, got himself some exercise, some fresh air and pretty much a life. I'd also like it very much if he didn't turn up on the news while I'm trying to eat.

Otherwise I’m going to point the Japanese Whale Fleet in his direction.

*You're a very close second KB.

Birthdays; Then & Now

Birthday’s aye? The shit right up till your 21st, just plain shit for every occasion thereafter.

Actually my 21st was quite shit, now that I think about it. Mine doubled as work dinner, which was planned first I might add and although I promised to do a very lady-like 21 shots, I didn’t. My boss at the time bought me a Playstation game – PS1 back in those days – which I thought was the shit until I found out it was a freebie he had been given by a supplier.

Still, it was the thought that counts I suppose.

Only at some point the thoughts stop. And birthdays are no more of a celebration than they are something you have to write on the calendar each year. Yesterday was my birthday and although Mrs ClubDes and Junior made a fuss, nothing much else happened.

Not that I expected it to be headline news but no matter how low key things have gotten you always hope that this year will be as exciting as the time you got an HMX, an underwater walkman or Castle Grayskull. It’s that expectation that makes the day suck a whole lot more when it doesn’t come to fruition.

I really should know better. After all my philosophy on life is that the eternal pessimist is never disappointed...

So as I counted away the minutes at work on a day where my importance was no more enhanced than that of any other, I still had hope that Facebook, of all things, would save my day. For I knew that when I got home and logged in I would be welcomed by a virtual wall of birthday greetings. Now that would be the shit.

Only it was complete shit, because a few months ago I removed my birth date from my profile to make it harder for someone to steal my identity. With that gone, no bugger got a reminder that yesterday was my birthday. Online safety, it would seem, is not without a sense of irony.

Admittedly it wasn’t all grim. Choppa whipped out a slab of banana cake upon my arrival, with candles no less. Maxi promised me that Lisa Lewis was on her way (she wasn’t. The bitch.) and Bruiser got me really bailed up with talk of buying me G.I.Joes for a present. He really is the mother I always wish I had.

So I’ve decided that next year, my 35th, will be the shit. I’m going to hold an all expenses paid party to which I will invite all 64 of my Stalkbook friends, most of the people I work with, old Veitnam buddies and everybody that is anybody in my magnificent life.

I will even fly in mates from overseas and I’ll make the joke that the only time you get this many friends in one room is at a funeral. It will be funny on so many levels. The dress code for the night will be tight, revealing, or both.

It will be held at some venue like Queens Wharf only not quite as gay. It will be something of a cross between an old school sports disco, a rock concert and a dance party. There will be tables, couches and a dance area. Upstairs there will be a gaming area for Junior and his mates to hang out and watch the adults get pissed below and it will be there that Big Gay Ray will spend most of the night, breaking the spirit of many a 11 year old on the PS3.

There will be a constant stream of food and piss, all served by ridiculously good looking waitresses that I will have handpicked and that Almo will spend the night hitting on. Matty T will have them all mentally organised into his Top Ten and DougalMac will try to get subtle cell phone photos of them all.

At some point The ClubDes House Band will make an appearance comprising of me and other muso mates. We will rock out with our cocks out on a handful of songs like “Waking up in ClubDes” and other likeminded anthems that put lead in my pencil. I won’t sing much myself, because I am quite shit, but I’ll do one or two numbers like “Jessies Girl” that only KB will get.

At some point the juniors of the world will be sent home and the party will really start a rockin’. The entire night’s playlist will be from my iPod and it will be good, damn good. There will be lights, smoke and free taxi rides home and for many, many months afterwards we’ll all talk about it as the night we really did party like it was 1999.

It will be the shit.

P.S. The cost of which, even at this early stage, is looking like it’ll be something like a million bucks. I’d better start the whip round tomorrow...

Bruiser did try to spark things up for my birthday...

Cats & Tats

I know I’ve said it once but I’m going to say it again; my cat is awesome.

Now I don’t want you to think that I’m one of those spinster types that keep photos of their pets on their desk and as screensavers and yes, I know pets and kids are never quite as good looking in reality as you’d like to think they are, but mine is.

My only wish is that he was big enough for me to mount and ride him.

Imagine that Jermaine, me arriving at your place on my giant domestic cat. I would never need to tie him up because he’d only ever serve one master and we’d be able to communicate in much the same way that only Han Solo could understand Chewbacca.

He’d be like that bloody horse of the National Bank ads too and just appear when you least expected, watching, always watching. Like Aslan the lion only less Christian. At night I would ride him bareback through the fields, holding on only by handfuls of his white fur as his muscular legs propelled us through the long grass.

Later we would wash the excitement off by bathing together in the lake which is not at all odd because my cat really does dig water; he’ll often hop in the shower or dip his paws in a bath. See I told you, he’s awesome.

If I ever got round to having a tattoo I’d seriously contemplate having him on one arm and our other cat on the other. Not as in a gay Lassie portrait kind of way, but in a Chris Garver tiger sprawling up each arm way. That would be awesome. Tattoos are awesome. I wish I had one.

The reason I never got a tattoo for a long time is that I feared little things, like pain, and looking like a complete peen-arse because I’ve got skinny extremities and a kick arse tattoo definitely loses some, if not all, of its coolness when etched on the guns of a nine year old.

For a long time I was comfortable in telling myself that that was the reason but then it dawned on me that far skinnier, far weaker and far more tragic peeps than I have been tattooed and they look awesome.

Except the bogan at my school that lied about his age so that he could get a tat a full year before he was legally allowed to.

He went to one of those parlours where everyone who works there looks like they have Hepatitis and as you’ll find out a few months later, they did. His tat sucked and looked ridiculous on his skinny, pale arm, especially when he wore his sleeveless flannelette shirt on freezing cold days, just so he could show us all his ink stain. What a winner.

Tattoo wearing is very much in vogue these days. Everybody seems to have at least one and isn’t afraid to show them, as a mark of their individuality as much as it is art and I like that, I really do. If there’s one thing that excites me more than riding my cat bareback it’s a girl with a spectacularly cool sleeve, or two.

But there’s a small, nagging irony in this whole thing that I just can’t seem to get over; people get tattooed to express their individuality but yet consume the same products en masse that make them far from an individual i.e. cell phones, iProducts, clothes etc.

Once upon a time people got tattooed because it really did make them stand out, so much so that society shunned them. Now I can’t help but think people get tattooed because everyone else is. So now I have another reason as to why I won’t be getting one any time soon and I feel strangely contented with it.

P.S. Your new sleeve is awesome KB. Like the song, you are the only exception.

Me and my cat. Awesome.

Whether You Smoke 'Em Or Poke 'Em...

Heard the one about Sammy Davis Jnr greeting Dean Martin at the pearly gates after his death?

“Well” says Sammy, “That’s fags for you Deano; whether you smoke ‘em or you poke ‘em, they’ll always kill you in the end”. You might need to Google it – or JFGI as my mate KB would say – to fully see the humour in it.

But I was reminded of it just the other night whilst waiting in the ‘express’ isle at the local chicken coop of a supermarket. What should have been a five minute milk and cat food expedition turned into a near death experience; I waited so long to get through I nearly lost the will to live.

The holdup was some silly bitch buying cigarettes, which are so unpopular these days even supermarkets can’t be arsed selling them. And hey, if Countdown can’t be bothered selling it then you know it must be shit. Lounge suites, yes. Durries, no.

So when you ask for smokes now at a supermarket there is a very high chance that the Chinese / Japanese / Indian girl at the checkout a) won’t know what they are, b) have any under her counter if she does and c) spend the next ten minutes rummaging through the various checkouts trying to find some.

Eventually, when she does get back to your line of dead men walking, it will be the wrong size packet, which is important because if there’s one thing that a smoker needs its more nicotine.

Funnily enough the cat food I was holding was not the one I really wanted either – the healthy weight formula – because that too was the wrong size. It only comes in big bags does the diet stuff, so you have to buy a shitload whether you like it or not. Defeats the point doesn’t it?

On one hand the wait is great, for making the buyer feel even more ostricicsed for still buying the silly things, but stink for every sad bugger waiting in the queue behind them. Like me. Why is it that supermarkets never make the promise that if you’re not served in ten minutes your purchase is free...?

Speaking of annoying, my son made me sit through the latest Justin Bebo video today. The one where he sings about having an Eenie Meenie penis or something.

He’s a smart cookie is the boy with a toilet swirly for a haircut; in this video he’s teamed up with the token black soul guy and he’s doing his bit for the self esteem of teen girls everywhere by having some of the biggest breasted adolescent girls I’ve ever seen dancing around him.

Can someone do us all a favour and get the kid hooked on smokes real quick please? Sammy Davis Jnr is waiting to greet him...

Deano and Sammy - cooler than The Beibo will ever be.

May I Butter Your Ring?

Have you had the misfortune to watch New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker yet?

It is, hands down, the gayest cooking show produced in this country since Hudson and Hall. I watch it only because it’s sandwiched between two of my guilty pleasures, TV wise, Tabitha’s Salon Takeover and Project Runway. But more on those in a later blog...

The title itself is a complete misnomer; this is not a show about sexy people baking, far from it. In fact the only two contestants with anything going for them looks wise – the blonde with the very cool tattooed sleeve and the dump-me-and-I’ll-stalk-you redhead – were the first two eliminated. If the show was true to its title that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

Several weeks on and we are left with a couple of real mingers; the frighteningly mannish Courtney, the drugged, almost catatonic Toni and the man moutain that is Emma, who is somewhere in between the two. Perhaps that’s why they’ve become so proficient in baking – society has shunned them into hiding in the kitchen.

The real star of the show, or villain, depending on which side of Poo Bay you drop your anchor, is Grayson Coutts, son of world renowned yachtie Russell. When he’s not baking, Grayson is a makeup artist. Oh how proud Russell must be of his son right now, baking brownies whilst he’s off playing with seamen in a boat somewhere. Freud would have a field day with that family dynamic, I’m sure.

Not that being camper than a row of tents is the thing that irks about Grayson. Were that just it then we heterosexual men would quite happily watch his firm, but gentle hands craft his culinary masterpieces whilst clad in one of his many tight fitting wife beaters.

There is however, the small matter of host Colin Mathura-Jeffree and his none too subtle desire to butter Graysons baking ring. Needless to say the sexual tension between the two leads to more in-your-end-o than my mate KB has to put up with being the only girl in her sausage fest of a workplace.

It all adds up to quite possibly the worst hour on TV right now but it’s like a train wreck, you just have to keep watching to see how bad it will get.

Like my good mate Bruiser, who is not one to turn down a good rimming, but the Grayson & Colin show is too much even for a happily married man like he. It works him up to such a state each time it’s on that he has to watch some very disturbing German porn immediately afterwards, just to calm him down.

Thankfully last night’s episode saw the elimination of Grayson Coutts, much to Colin’s disappointment and our relief. Now the two can go off and pack some fudge together and leave the baking to the ugly girls.

Just the way it should be.

Grayson, who does wonderful things with fudge.