The Dumb Down Burger

The intelligence of this country took another hit this week with the arrival of the Double Down burger from that bastion of healthy life choices, KFC.

Naturally the health conscious freaked and got their miserable, puckered anus like faces in and on everything dispelling the nutritional content of such a thing. It was an exercise that backfired spectacularly because in doing so they created huge hype to something that even the company admitted on camera it was never really going to promote.

Oh and of course the media had a field day with it.

I’ve said it once but I love the sound of my voice so I’ll do so again; we’re a pretty sad fucken country when something like a burger gets the tits in a tangle and it starts becoming a lead news story. It’s not news, it’s a burger. It’s not a health epidemic, it’s a burger and it’s certainly not a freedom of choice issue because it’s only a fucken burger.

And are you, like me, sick to death of seeing nutritionists bagging everything they personally wouldn’t eat and taking the moral high ground accordingly? I for one know that they don’t practice what they preach for I regularly bump into (I wish, she’s quite tidy) the dietitian I had whilst in the hospital last, at the supermarket and she buys some shit, so there you go.

And they’re only ever one of two types of people are these self appointed experts; morbidly obese thus completely jealous of anyone that eats the Double Down, or stick thin and thus incapable of holding the Double Down let alone eat it (thus being completely jealous of anyone who can).

It's not even the worst burger I've ever heard off. That particular honour goes to one that a guy who we always called 'uncle' but actually wasn't, told me to ask for a fur burger at the corner dairy. Now I might have only been 10 years old but even I suspected I didn't want one, especially as he haven't given me any money to pay for it.

By all means, fight the good fight on childhood obesity and all that jazz but pick your battles aye? Steer clear of anything that any fast food joint churns out because people go there to buy that rubbish. They don’t give a toss about you telling them how much salt is in the damn thing or the calorie count any more than a smoker cares how much nicotine is in their durry; all they care is that there is some.

So the Double Down is here for five weeks and for the small minority of the population that have or will try them, like Chef and JK, they’re pretty good by all accounts. KFC are rubbing their fat caked hands with all the free publicity they’ve gotten over it and every celery eater who spoke up about body mass index and shit looks like a fool, again.

Personally that stuff goes right through me and looks the same coming out as it did going in, so I won’t be partaking unless I have the urge for a cheap colonic. But I do feel a little bit dumber for having seen / heard / read the whole sorry saga so maybe a product rename is in order:

New from KFC – The Dumb Down Burger.

Even the Chef, with his extraordinary culinary palate, inhaled his Dumb Down burger.

What A Bunch Of Cork Soakers

Well Ken ‘Moon Man’ Ring got that one right didn’t he? What a cork soaker.

Sad isn’t it, that one aging hippy with a theory about the moon and tides has almost had as much press as the earthquake he reckons he predicted. Even sadder that the media in this country tried milking it for everything they could get, just in case. The cork soakers.

Good ol Ken - let’s call him Ringpiece for short - predicted that another major earthquake would happen in Christchurch on the 20th of March, just before lunch time. Ringpiece, it should be noted, claimed to have predicted the big one too. After it had happened.

Then he changed that prediction to be a couple of days either side of the 20th. Finally he decided it wasn’t going to be an earthquake at all, but rather a spot of bad weather. Naturally a lot of folk down that way, upon hearing this prediction, freaked. And who would blame them given that their life these days is one big aftershock occasionally interrupted by normality?

So why the change in prediction this time? Did the pressure of expectation get to him? Did the moon and tides suddenly change? Maybe the tsunami generated by Japans earthquake threw the charts of course. Whatever the excuse something must have happened because it’s quite the downgrade isn’t it, from a major shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates to a spot of precipitation in the air?

It was foggy in Christchurch today actually. Cue the spooky music.

Maybe it’s because just like physics and tarot card readers he’s full of shit? Ringpiece reminds me a lot of a conspiracy theorist and I farken hate them. And just like a theorist it strikes me that someone like Ringpiece doesn’t actually need to prove anything.

Oh sure, science hasn’t yet proven any correlation between the cycle of the moon and the frequencies of earthquakes but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection. Likewise no one has actually proven that Tower 11 was an inside job on 9 / 11 but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t and nobody can really say for sure if MI5 killed Princess Diana because again, no one has proved they didn’t.

Only they have, for all three of the above scenarios, but guys like Ringpiece thrive on that little bit of doubt that exists when the full story can’t ever be laid out from start to finish like it is in the movies. They work on coincidence and happenstance and so long as there is fear of the unknown they get the publicity they long for in order to promote their myth conceptions.

And Ringpiece has had loads of publicity. My favorite was when he appeared on Harae Mae John Campbell’s show and got ripped to shreds by a host who was given the dirty nappy of all interviews by his producers and was clearly pissed about it. He got a lot of stick about it too did John but I for one thought he did a fine job tearing strips off a fear monger.

In Ringpiece’s case it’s a win win situation; predicting weather and shit is flaky at best and no one ever expects meteorologists and alike to get it right all of the time. So he predicts a lunar event that if it doesn’t come off means nothing, no sweat off anybody’s sack, but if he gets it right he becomes the authority on everything. Or in his own words:

"My business is only a bunch of opinions, as I have wearily repeated. There is no claim on accuracy; proof or anything other than that I have opinions."

"I don't claim to predict the weather. No-one can. We are not gods. Nobody has all the answers. In my books, it states on paragraph one on page one that what I say is opinion."

Nice bit of bullet dodging that, claiming his is an opinion. The book is $48 by the way and can be found on the shelf labeled ‘B for Bullshit’ at your nearest bookseller. Right next to Kelvin Quickwanks literary efforts.

Christchurch did have a sizeable aftershock last night, 5.1 to be exact. The believers will of course say The Moon Man got it right but that ignores the fact that before he changed his prediction three times, he reckoned it would be a magnitude 7+. In his own opinion, of course.

Perhaps he’ll claim next that tomorrow is going to be Tuesday too, in a remarkable piece of foresight he could have only extracted from his ring piece.

What a cork soaker.

You Can't Buy Redemption Tony

Sneaky 'ol Wifebeater Vietch, he nearly pulled it off didn't he?

He nearly had us all forgiving him and dare I say it, feeling for the guy after his early guilty plea in court this week thus saving everybody a drawn out, expensive court case. He gave an emotional speech outside court where he told how dreadful he's felt ever since that day and that same evening Harae Mai John Campbell just about had him in tears in an exclusive interview. It was so emotional that I for one stopped bashing my wife to watch.

Yes, it was a big day alright and it seemed like that Smack My Bitch Up Veitchy was well on the path to redemption. Why even in the Campbell Live interview - where he showed that he’s just as annoying as an interview as he is when the interviewer - he was even promising legal action over the many factions of the media who cracked a huge fat when the story first broke and got so excited at the prospect of tearing apart one of their own just plain made shit up.

Now on this one tiny aspect I'm in favour of Tony the Muss. I don't condone what he did and personally I think someone should have the opportunity of kicking him in his midget back just as hard, or harder, than he did his ex missus. But if there’s one thing I hate its people that profligate mis-information under the guise of 'news'. And this case was full of it. The NZ Herald for example, the newspaper that some folk (most of who live in Auckland where the Herald is the delivered it should be remembered) rate as the best in the country, churned out a ton of crap that was factually incorrect. Now that might not make them the best paper in the land but unfortunately they are the biggest and that means a lot of impressionable people took what they printed as gospel.

Radio Live, the radio station that is quite possibly only listened to by the deaf and could easily be renamed 'Wankers Live' and no one would bat an eyelid, allowed some of its hosts to embellish the facts of the case and thus make their ranting and empty promises of 'ruining Veitch' sound all the more reasonable. I don't actually know anyone who listens to Wankers Live but there have to be a few and unfortunately that means more counter knowledge has found its way into tea rooms and lounges up and down the country.

So, now somewhat in the clear, Veitchy is promising to take to the cleaners the very media he not so long ago he was gagging to be a part of again. That seems genuine doesn't it? Yep, how could we not now side with Veitch?

Because a few things haven't gone quite so accordingly to plan for the White Ribbon poster boy. First the news broke that some of the character references put before the court, written by some very famous people, were not gathered under the pretence of keeping Veitch out of jail at all. Rather they were written under the understanding that they were to be used to help Veitch get his passport back. Veitch's father it seems, who obtained the references, seems to share his sons talent for being a smooth talking bullshit artist.

A couple of other things didn't sit well with me either. His speech outside of the court room was read like it was the Saturday night sports news that Veitch used to read. Before he smacked his bitch up. Infact everything he reads or makes a statement over sounds as genuine as Adolf Eichmann’s 'Final Solution'. Let's not forget this is geezer who is trained to write creatively and more disturbingly, emotively. How can we believe anything that comes out of his mouth?

And I’m not the only one who doesn’t seem to be buying the drama. Many commentators are so underwhelmed by his apparent lack of remorse that in a last ditch attempt at being noticed, Veitch tried to top himself again this weekend. His third failed attempt at taking his live since this all started. You’d think he’d get it right by now huh? How hard is it to kill one’s self? That is if you genuinely want to kill yourself and aren’t just looking to get attention…

Let’s not feel sorry for Veitch. He’s a man who has courted the limelight when it suited him. He has huge money behind him (his in-laws are millionaires) and he has an expensive legal and PR team that have gone to great lengths to intimidate and dig the dirt on his ex partner. And yet we're supposed to buy the line he rolls out regularly that he’s lost everything?!

Veitch is finding out the hard way that money and fame can buy you a lot of things, but it can’t buy you redemption. That you have to earn.

Cheer Up Emo

The world is full of arseholes, figuratively speaking, but that shouldn’t mean folk have to act like one. Take for instance the foreskin in Nebraska who took an AK47 to the shopping mall because life got a little bit tough for him. What a cocksucker.

You know that it is we the people promote this kind of bullshit. That’s right, you and I. Not because we allow video game companies to make first person shooter games, or Hollywood to glorify violence on the big and small screen. No, that stuff has always been there and always will. We do so by buying the newspapers, the magazines and the pay TV news channels that run endless post massacre articles on the waste of space that ultimately immortalise him in the eyes of other wasters who long to be adored.

These are gonads that aren't satisified being just like all the other freaks and geeks on YouTube, stapling their genitals to a piece of wood and farting near an open flame. No they want to be news worthy and fuck me if there isn’t a world waiting to appease them. Just like the popularity of the link to the story about some cooze shagging in a public place, we’re all gagging to hear about the next Emo who goes postal because his boyfriend dumped him.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Emos, I think everyone should own one. But it does strike me that Emos are just Goths who think they’re too depressed to be called Goth. Back in my day, when gay meant happy, kids went Goth for the same reason kids today go Emo – they didn’t want to have their hair cut when their Mum said so, they didn’t want to bathe and they needed an excuse to listen to crap music that noone else listened to like the Cure. Emos could actually save themselves the money they spend on eyeliner by presenting themselves to the nearest heterosexual man who would be more than happy to give them two black eyes each morning. Cheer up Emo, for fucks sake.

Now I may not be the sharpest dildo in the draw but I can’t help but think there’s something retarded in not wanting to conform but yet still aligning yourself with a group of folk who all, wait for it, conform. How does that work?! If you wanna be out there, then walk round in the buff, not many folk are out there doing that right at this moment in time.

I tried playing the ‘too cool for school’ card myself once, or rather twice actually by not going to either of my two school formals. I made out like I didn’t want to go because everyone else actually was, but in truth it was down to my mother being tighter than a nuns nasty with money and not wanting to shell out for the suit hire. The bitch. But I can’t complain, we had the necessities of life like a 12 seated mahogany dinner table that cost more than the house and we weren’t actually allowed to ever sit at. There was only the four of us mind you so maybe that’s why. We made it look empty.

No there’s only one sure fire way to deal with these wannabe martyrs. Ignore them. Don’t publicise, analyse or glorify their actions. Obviously its news but lets stick to the bare facts and report something along the lines of “Loser Kid Fucks Up Mass Murder By Only Shooting Seven”. Belittle the guy even in death by taking the piss out of him because he only shot seven in a crowded mall with an automatic rifle, which is a poor effort really. Prove to all that want to be like him that even in death, society will still see you as a loser.

At the end of the day it’s up to us, you and me, to not buy this shit when it sees print. Because like it or not, we all play a part. Just like as in the death of Princess Diana, our hands inadvertently have blood on them for creating the demand that drove the paparazzi to chase her through the streets of Paris. You personally may not have bought the mag that ran the photos, but you can bet your Mum, sister or slightly effeminate mate helped the cause by buying the latest Womans Day whilst waiting in the queue at Woolies.

Incidentally, sealed sections in chick mags have become decidedly lame these days. If I’m getting my wife to buy the mag for the sealed section I want to see full on bush, milkers and hell why not, cock. If all I’m getting is animated diagrams and raunchy forums all written, one handed, by the same fat guy then I’m going to start stapling that fucker back up and returning it under the pretence of false advertising. I might even include several polaroids of myself depicting the type of imagery one expects to find in a sealed section. And don’t give me the ‘10 best positions’ rubbish again because we all know there’s only two – the one where your partner does all the work and the one where you just need to lie there.

I wonder if Emos have their own positions? I doubt it. I can only imagine depression sex begins and probably never ends in the missionary mode. Cheer up Emo, for fucks sake.

Teen Had Group Sex in Public View - Part Deux

Nearly a week on and this particular story is still one of Stuffs Top Ten most viewed items - now that's a lot of folk hoping there's a picture or two and I reckon it's a bit like when you can't find anything in the pantry to eat, but you keep checking back every 20 minutes to see if there has been any change...

Teen Had Group Sex in Public View

You know, when you read a newspaper headline like “Teen had group sex in public view”, you would think they would have the decency to include pictures.

Now I’m not talking about pictures of the act itself, although if they were to print those I, like thousands of other horny males would fell compelled to view them. We wouldn’t enjoy it mind you. No, what we really want to know is was she hot or not? Because it’s bad enough reading a story that makes it seem as though everyone else is getting better sexy time than you, but if it was a hot chick putting out too? Then that would keep a lad going for quite some time I can tell you.

It never is of course. Like when you hear some teacher or babysitter has jumped her 14 year old male ward and we all think ‘Oh yeah, another Penthouse forum just wrote itself’! Then it turns out, when you finally see a picture of her, that she’s the type of bird you’d have to roll in flour to get to the wet bits and suddenly it’s not so cool. Or prostitutes, who in the movies and TV are so pretty they could be waitresses and are so ridiculously hot that it’s almost unbelievable that they would need to be paid for sex. Almost, but not quite. Hey, if the top is coming off, we’ll believe anything.

These misconceptions we fellas have are down to Porn. Ever since we realised it did something if you played with it, we’ve been right sucked in by the one medium that has served as our single most comprehensive guide to sex and relationships and led us to believe, quite wrongly I’m told, that every girl wants in the bum. Porn it would seem, has a lot to answer for.

But then so too has my mate Big Al who this week made me view the single most disturbing thing on the web that I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen a lot of disturbing things. Yet ironically, repulsed though I was, I had to watch it all right till the end. Again, it’s a male thing; we have to watch because if we don’t, we worry that we might miss some tidbit that makes us a better lay. it didn't hold any such gems unfortunately, but it has put me right off chocolate Mr Whippy icecream.

Coffee enemas. Now there's something that had to be thought up by a sexual deviant. It's all the rage in detox land, is pumping a couple of cups of cold coffee up your date. Does wonderful things to your colon they reckon. Quite frankly, if you're the kind of cat that is willing to pay someone a huge amount of your hard earned cash for them to suggest jamming something up your shitter is going to make you healthy and you take their word for it, then I'd recommend replacing the coffee with a pistol and pulling the trigger until it goes click. You twat.

My mate Jase’s Mum and dad had a mega porn collection. In truth it was only half a dozen tapes but in the eyes of a roomful of 16 year old boys with swollen testes, that was a mega haul. Conveniently for us, they were into their stock car racing and would travel every other weekend meaning that we chaps would head up to his house for a sleep over and 24 hours of masturbating our brains out. At night we would all lay on the floor in the lounge in our sleeping bags, with our knees bent, watching back to back skin flicks. Every 20 minutes or so someone would make a 10 minute visit to the toilet, where they either were doing what I was doing, or there was a really bad shared case of the runs happening every other weekend too.

Thankfully those days are no more and the new generation of wankers can surf the net one handed in the privacy of their own room. Even so, I still reckon that out there somewhere, even now, a group of lads are trying to play it cool and not make it too obvious to anyone else in the room that they’ve cracked one over the video with the bad tracking they’re all watching.

Ever notice how attractive blonde girls seem to be hanging out in twos or threes these days? It’s quite the phenomenon. I thought it was standard sheila practice to hang out with at least one poo chick and thus increase your chances of being noticed, but that doesn’t seem to happen any more. Thankfully we blokes still live by those rules, and will often surround ourselves with several of evolutions missing links in order to bump up our chances of being noticed by a threesome of blondes. It usually backfires though and inevitably we end up as a group of munters who all think we’re better looking than the guy next to us. Which we're not.

So I guess if all the blondies are hanging together and the sultry brunettes that look good in any number do their own thing, then the poor old Plain Jane’s and aesthetically challenged have to either go it alone, or have group sex in a public place.

But if only we could see the pictures to make sure that’s how it goes….