Father Issues? Not Me.

I had myself quite the cathartic moment this week.

It came to me with the news that T-Bag is off to Canada to be with his good looking missus which is a far better excuse than the one he tried to use in ’68 when trying to dodge the draft for Nam. Back then he wanted to be a Mountie, now he’s just off for some mounting.

It reminded me that my long last father is in Canada somewhere and that I’ve hardly ever mentioned him to you lot. My mother on the other hand, she of the nut bar variety, gets load of mentions on account of her being a silly bitch and because I just couldn’t make up some of the shit she’s come up with.

Like the time she painted the kitchen of our house GREEN. Not just green mind you, but that bright almost fluorescent shade which is always used to demonstrate nuclear waste green. She also renovated the place. It was a state house. Years later my Grandfather bought her a house and to prove the green kitchen was no fluke, she painted the entire concrete floor battleship grey. Now Granddad had been in the Navy but even he struggled to figure that one out.

My father skipped the country when I was about 10 for reasons I’m not exactly sure. I’d like to think that it was because he tried and failed to get custody of me but it’s probably something much less romantic i.e. he’s a douche.

I still remember with some clarity the actual custody hearing itself. It took place in some relic of a town hall time building where the floors were so shiny I could see right up the dress shorts my mother had made me wear. Dress shorts. Now there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one. No one wearing shorts is doing so to dress up.

Both paternal and maternal sides of the family were there that day and I was ushered between the two of them as they met with those making the decision. It was quite the intimidating process for a boy my age and I was fair bricking it the whole time. I was asked twice who I wanted to live with and when in the room with my mother I said her and when with my father I said him. Let’s be honest, had Adolf Hitler been there I would’ve given him my vote too.

And speaking of which – have you heard of Godwins Law? It’s brilliant. He theorises that every chat stream / online discussion / forum will eventually lead to someone making a comparison, usually quite outrageously and incorrectly, to Nazi Germany. He’s fucken right too. I do it all the time.

Anyhoo, Father didn’t get custody of me, obviously and did a runner not long after. He was a runner actually, well into his marathons and shit and it’s that which has enabled me to track him across the years over a little thing called the Internet.

All connection to my father pretty much died when my Grandfather on his side of the family did about 15 years ago. Unfortunately he ended up with Alzheimer’s and the end, like so often for sufferers, was a blessing. Before that he had remarried a strictly Christian lady who disliked cursing and burping. Something I found out the hard way.

But then he’d never been the same since my grandmother and his childhood sweetheart had died some 10 years before that. I remember the day because of the way my step father, a man of extraordinary tact broke the news to me after getting of the phone: “That was your dick of a father. Your grandmother is dead. Don’t cry about it”.

The final chapter in this story of happy families starts with Facebook which my my uncle used to contact me and eventually fill me in on my father’s actual story. Turns out he married some world famous psychologist who has forbidden him all contact with NZ and his family. Ha. 25 years ago he shot the gap to escape an over bearing control freak (my mother) only to run into the arms of another. Fate it would seem is not without a sense of irony.

Oh and he’s not actually in Canada anymore, so don’t bother asking after him Timmo.

My Father and his dress shorts, last seen in Hawaii (true story).

Destiny Bullshit...

Straight from the Josef Goebbels Handbook of Bullshit comes the latest statement from Destiny Church in response to half the Brisbane Chapter congregation turning its back on the money making cult. Their answer to it all is:

“We’re working through a process”

Translation:

“We don’t really know what we’re doing”

Of course Goebbels knew a thing or two about bullshit. His thinking followed the ‘Big Lie’ theory of thought that if you told a lie enough times, it would soon become believed to be fact. And it must be true because that’s the very principal that most of the conspiracy theories on the Internet are built on.

Goebbels told Nazi Germany that they were winning the war right up until the last days. I wonder if Pastor Brian will do the same with his flock....

Bring Back The Luncheon

We wound back the clock at our place this long weekend; luncheon and tomato sauce sandwiches for lunch. Tidy.

Remember how luncheon used to be staple in our diets? Mum would come back from shopping with a pile of luncheon the size of a small child, all of which cost her about 30 cents. For you and I that meant luncheon, cheese slice and tomato sauce roly-polies all week, the breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions.

Then two things happened that almost irreversibly struck luncheon off the shopping list of mothers across the land. First, some ponce called Tarquin had an allergic reaction, allegedly to a slice of luncheon that he was given by the butcher who gave every kid a free slice of luncheon in the supermarket. We loved it because it was luncheon and that stuff was the shit. Our mothers loved it because it keep us quiet for 10 minutes.

But then Tarquin went and ruined it for everybody by having some sort of spew in the supermarket that was instantly attributed to the last thing he ate; free luncheon. To this day nobody knows if it really was the luncheon or something else that caused it, like perhaps the anti-bacterial soap that his mum doused him in after playing with the coloured boys up the street.

The story also caught the attention of the kind of people who long to make a fuss out of absolutely nothing and thus the seeds of a mass panic were sown in the guise of 'Letters to the Editor' and calls to talk back radio, all purporting to have experienced the holocaust that is free luncheon. Why they had never mentioned it before was never explained and thanks to their efforts a nation of precious mothers turned their fear from that of the coloured boys up the street to free luncheon in supermarkets, all the while stuffing Tarquin and Sebastian full of artificially coloured cereals, cordials and ridiculous things like chicken nuggets.

Those very same shit stirrers got their knickers in a twist the other week about silly boys doing silly things in front of swastikas and alike at the Auckland Museum and true to form, did they kick up a needless waste of all our time about that too. Suddenly several luncheon-free-diet boys were 'Public Enemy Number One' and only the butchers who used to give out free luncheon really knew how they felt.

It all reminded me of this one time as a child, whilst being dragged along to yet another dead set boring craft fair (the likes of which your parents always made you go to) I came across a guy peddling military memorabilia and man, did he have some good shit. Hanging high in the corner was a genuine Hitler Youth outfit and it was the business. I didn't dare ask where it came from because quite frankly he had a thick European accent and was roughly the age of an escaped-from-justice war criminal, but my god did I want it. Why? because it was cooler than free luncheon, that's why.

Thankfully due to the price (or because they never bought me anything I actually ever wanted anyway) my parents had the good sense not to indulge me that day and I was not given the chance to make a mistake that only a naive child would make; like bowing down in front of a banner bearing the swastika or in my case, strutting around a predominantly brown neighbourhood in a Hitler Youth costume.

Of course the other stink thank that heralded the end of free luncheon was that at some point we started to get a bit hoighty toighty about what we ate and suddenly common, we've been eating the stuff for ages luncheon was not quite good enough.

Instead Mum's started buying things like shaved champagne ham which had to be posh because it has booze in the title, but went shit with tomato sauce. That then lead to the cured meats, the peppered pastrami and these days, prosciutto which is ham you silly bitch, only at three times the price.

So bring back giving out the free luncheon I say, because life was never the same the day after they stopped.

Only Singing When The Team Is Winning

If you’re not a football fan you might like to stop reading this particular posting right now. If you’re a croquet fan then as usual, there will be absolutely fuck all for you in this blog. Ever.

But back to the football, specifically the Wellington Phoenix who are an average team in an average league. Don’t get me wrong, I love what they’ve done for football in this city as far as the kids are concerned who now have very real heroes they can look up to and idolise in person every other week. My ten year old son has the top, the ball and the flag, all of which were ridiculously overpriced as is all supporters wear in this country and he’s not alone, Phoenix wear is everywhere.

But I’m not so easily sucked in by all the yellow and black tat or the free poster they give away in the paper each season. Maybe it’s the 25 odd years of supporting the one club, or maybe it’s just that I’m a depressing bastard but I find it very hard to get excited about the Phoenix quite as much as self appointed ‘Yellow Army’ has.

Or to be more precise Ricki Herbert’s Yellow Army, as one of the main chants that the group belt out ad nauseum explains. Why they chose ‘yellow’ when for the first few seasons the side wore black is a mystery to me, maybe it was the badge; it’s yellow and black. Black is cooler of course but screaming out that you’re part of a ‘black army’ has so many negative connotations it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Incidentally I’ve been watching a fantastic series on Discovery on the Second World War called ‘Apocalypse’ which they’re showing to mark the anniversary of the conflict. The footage has been re-mastered and is all in colour and is absolutely terrific because so often film from that period is in stark black and white. The thing that really struck me though was just how damn tight those Nazis were in terms of colour coordination.

Black on brown, red on black, grey on black; they might have been a strapon short of a good night in the smarts department but boy could those dudes accessorise. Every movie or TV show that has ripped off that long black leather trench coat look owes Adolf & Co. a big ‘right on’ for pioneering it. If only he and his cronies had of copyrighted it, they would be rich, dead pricks by now.

But back to the Phoenix. Ricki Herbert is the coach of the team and he’s a nice enough fella. He loves ‘The Army’ but then he would, because so far they haven’t turned on him, not even when the team is playing depressingly conservative football like they seem to do most of the time.

Against Adelaide the Army turned against everyone else but Ricki and the players, instead targeting the officials and every Adelaide player who was a ‘cheating Aussie bastard’, even the foreign ones. Which says a lot about The Army if you ask me; they might make a lot of noise, at least for the first 30 minutes, but like most attempts at chanting at a New Zealand sports event it starts and finishes decidedly low brow.

But then that’s football fans for you. At its lowest common denominator it’s a mob mentality and if you chose your moment wisely you could yell out almost anything and it would become a chant. Quite how many rounds of “I love cock” you would get is a moot point; the fact is you would get some before the realisation kicked in that it had nothing to with the game.

Unfortunately the game itself was quite boring and you can take that from someone who has watched a lot of football over the years, some of which has been dead set boring. Certainly the three or four ‘fans’ standing behind us thought so and spent a good hour discussing everything under the sun bar the actual game. Ricki Herbert’s Yellow Army was decidedly quiet too, bar the occasional predictibal chants that my two ten year olds found highly amusing but then to them, swearing is.

Luckily I didn’t have to pay for our seats (which are yellow, maybe that’s it) so I don’t feel so bad about wasting 90 minutes of my life that I will never get back. But I do wonder when Ricki Herbert’s Yellow Army will start to feel the same, especially as they only seem to sing when the team is winning...

Free Jackets, Suburbian Snobbery and Miley's Mallow Puffs

Don’t you just love those guys that spend their days walking around in the free coaches’ jacket they got given for coaching their son’s sports team?

They strut around the place as if being a coach of a child’s sports team is just as important and impressive away from the sports field and as such we should all marvel in their awesomeness. We don’t of course but they spend the whole time cracking a fat over the very thought that we are all so aroused that we too are cracking one at the sight of them in their shiny jackets.

I should confess at this point, that on occasion, I am just such a jacket wearer. I have two which reside between Saturdays in the back of the passion wagon and yes, on the odd occasion I am out and about and in need of a jacket, I will wear one. But I feel like a complete tit the whole time. I am proud of the fact that I coach not one but two football teams and I am proud to wear the club colours, but not when I’m running errands like picking up the Vagiclean from the chemist for the wife.

My wife refers to just such a garment as a ‘Hutt Jacket’ on account of the fact that it looks like something someone from the Hutt, presumably of a lower socioeconomic standing, would wear, by choice. How she comes to that conclusion is beyond me because although she visited there a few times during our courting days, most of it was spent leaving the damn place as quick as she could so how she had time to conduct a comprehensive fashion survey of the residents is a conscientious point between us.

How funny is suburban snobbery? Some folk will do anything to make you think they reside somewhere a little more upmarket than they actually do. Back in the day people who live in certain parts of Taita liked to use the term ‘North Avalon’ because Avalon was a posh place to live. Posh for the Hutt anyway. Nobody was buying it, least of all the gang members who drove through ‘North Avalon’ on their way to the fortified gang patch just round the corner.

These days I can legally claim to living in a far poncier suburb than the shit hole I do on account of NZ Post having us on the boundary. We are literally half and half so subsequently I feel a lot more stuck up when down one end of the house than I do the other. But who really cares aye? I certainly don’t and as I’m not about to invite you lot over to our gaff anytime soon neither are you I suspect.

It was Maori Language Something week last week, did you know? The nervous Caucasian TV presenter attempting to welcome you with two minutes of badly pronounced Te Reo is usually the first sign; some dude having stuck up Maori terms for everything at your workplace is the second. And I don’t mind that, its all good fun, but when the Cartoon Network, which is an Australian run TV channel, broadcasts an entire week of badly over dubbed SpongeBob Squarepants in total Te Reo then you know shit has got out of hand.

What did they think would happen, that thousands of children under the age of 10 would be fluent by the weeks end after watching a cartoon with no subtitles? My son gave it about 40 seconds before deciding that Hannah Montana was far more interesting and that’s really saying something when you are a 10 year old boy.

Now I must admit that I fancy a bit of Miley Cyrus as much as the next fella but then I remind myself that her tasty mallow puffs are only 16 and that’s a bit too young even for me. But something I do fancy is when a crusty old sheila pulls up behind me in a car like the Mercedes SL Roadster (pictured). And its always some glamed up bird well past her prime driving because her husband, also well past his prime, buys her just such a car in the hope it keeps her from noticing he’s rooting someone the age of Miley Cyrus.

But its not just because it’s a fuck off shiny motor that I like the Mercedes SL, but it has these groves on the bonnet that make it look like it has cannons underneath the hood and who hasn’t wished they had a couple of those on the old passion wagon from time to time?

Ze Germans know a thing or two about nose cannons though, back in the 40’s I flew 29 sorties over occupied Europe and on a couple of occasions had the bally Hun up my pooper in his bally Messerschmitt ME 109 (also pictured). Now those things had the kind of nose cannon that caused a man to crack one out of fear, the worst kind of arousal.

Luckily I lived to tell the tale and wear shiny coach’s jackets, all of which makes me terribly important so there.

Gaylord Gayford - Yesterdays News

Now a few weeks ago I thought we agreed we'd vote for anyone but Gaylord Gayford in the world wide internet competition to find the next caretaker for the Great Barrier Reef. Imagine my surprise this week to find out that he had made it to the last fifteen. Geez, its almost as if no bugger reads this blog.

Gaylords good fortune made for more mutual hand jobs between him and former employers TV3, who's resources he had used to get that far. They ran the story almost every night this past week and so often I had to wonder if there was any genuine news to report on. There was of course, but then that’s NZ for you; we care more for the antics of a cheeky wanker than we do the events of the world, where the adults live. We love that someone like Gaylord has gotten as far as he did because in some twisted way we like to think he represents NZ and that’s a cause we can get behind.

My real beef was not really with Gaylord. Yes, he's annoying and not the tiniest bit funny but deep down I hoped he would win because aside from the gratuitous follow up segments that Harae Mai John Campbell would do on him if he did, he'll be off our screens indefinitely. Man I hadn’t been that excited about a TV idiot moving on since Jason Gunn did back in the days when Thingees eye fell out on camera and gave everybody under the age of 10 nightmares for years. Gunn eventually came back and rather spookily hadn't appeared to aged at all. His jokes certainly hadn’t. All the oldies love Gunn but then they always did have a soft spot for the 'special' kid didn't they?

No what really twisted my nips about the whole Gaylord Gayford thing is that an event that is not in the slightest bit newsworthy made its way into the news. It's wasn’t even an event that is spectacular in its ingenuity. Oh wow, a competition on the Net. Big deal, at any one moment in time someone is pulling some stunt on the intraweb whether it be auctioning their 'virginity', raffling their house or selling a feijoa that looks like a Kiwi. Is it mildly amusing? Yes. Is it newsworthy? Maybe, but the Great Barrier Caretaker Hunt is right up their with Two Girls One Cup; you only want to see it the once.

Did you ever hear about the waster who walked the length of NZ a few years ago calling himself Bro Millionaire? He begged his way to an absurd amount of money on the back of being a little bit cheeky and a little bit entrepreneurial. Just like Gaylord. ZM, the radio station of choice for those that like to be told what they like, was right behind him and gave him all the free publicity he needed to make more money in a few weeks than you and I will in years of working full time. Wow, when you think of it like that its not so cheeky any more is it? When cheeky Bro Millionaire asked me for a dollar I told him to fuck off. Now that was cheeky.

See I'm always wary of advertising that makes it way into our conscious under the guise of 'news'. Why? Because as an individual I have a choice when it comes to unsolicited advertising; I don't have to watch the ads on TV, read the piles of junk mail that passes through my letterbox and I can hang the fuck up on cold callers. They’re all easy to ignore but when we start allowing subliminal advertising to infiltrate our news then we're giving up the power of choice. Let us not forget that this is how the Nazi propaganda machine worked too.

While there is no 'product' in Gaylords case, it borders on advertising. It's a competition based around a tourist attraction. Sure sounds like advertising to me. So is the story of the car company that's rolled out a new hybrid or the clothing manufacturer that has come up with some fantastic new fabric. A world first it may be, but I don't give a monkeys. If I do want to know that gem of groundbreaking news then trust me, I'll find it.

And the real proof was in the result. Gaylord didn’t win and for that I am both delighted and pissed off, for reasons listed earlier. Mind you neither did the kinky looking German girl, Mirjam, who got my vote or the sexy Australian girl, Hailey, who I cast a second vote for whilst pretending to be my wife. Hey I could only vote the once but both looked great in a bikini...

No Gaylord Gayford didn’t win but did you see that on the news? Or on Stuff? Or on Harei Mae John Campbell? No you did not. Because it wasn’t news when he was trying to win and it definitely wasn’t news when he lost.

I rest my case.

Earth Hour, Ribbon Wearing and Crap Art

How good was Earth Hour aye? Everybody switched off the non necessities of life for an hour i.e. the hallway light and collectively New Zealand saved 3.5% of a normal Saturday nights power usage. Great stuff.

Only 3.5% doesn't seem like a helluva lot does it? It's a piss poor amount really which I think says a lot about peoples awareness or desire to switch off, even when it's a much publicised party event like Earth Hour. Which I'm not against, really I'm not. I'm a closet greenie and have been for a few years now. I teach my son about recycling, I collect the water that I use when I rinse stuff in the sink and use it in the garden, I switch appliances off at the wall and I even let the yellow mellow sometimes. But only when it's the colour of apple juice, none of that first morning, Berocca coloured carry on. That stuff stinks at the best of times, there's no way I'm going to leave that for the family to walk in on.

I'm all for sustainability and reducing the carbon footprint, but I shake my head at shit like 'Earth Hour'. Let’s be honest, if we're serious about saving the planet then every hour should be earth hour. Easier said than done, I know, but switching off the lights on a few gay landmarks around the place for an hour is symbolic, but not terribly efficient, especially when the streets surrounding it are still lit up like Hiroshima was in 1945. That little irony seemed to have escaped the organisers of celebrations here in New Zealand, who held concerts and parties in squares and octagons up and down the country, all powered of course by power, which they used copious amounts of to help celebrate saving the power they just switched off.

Personally I think all landmarks should be lightless at night, unless of course they pose a serious risk to low flying aircraft and alike. If you want to see Auckland Harbour bridge at night then take a torch I say, or go sightsee during the day, like normal folk. This need to plaster lights all over everything is one of those things that city councils spend their time dreaming up to waste money on that they could actually spend on useful shit, like amenities, parks and other such rubbish.

I think commercial properties should have their power metered and when a predetermined threshold is met, booya, off goes the juice. Men in raincoats who list one of their hobbies as 'letter writing to the Editor' could all be employed to cruise city centres each evening noting down companies that leave the lights burning for the masses all night, every night. For every hour a light burns in an unoccupied building after 6pm there will be the penalty of an hour's less power during actual business hours. For that real 'Earth Hour' affect none of the offenders should actually be told that this is going to happen. It just does. Fuck yeah.

Any company silly enough not to get the message the first time gets to take it to the next level; for every hour a light burns in an unoccupied burning after 6pm the CEO has his testes wired to the mains for an hour. Now that’s a cause we can all get behind.

A bit like ribbon wearing. Everyone seems to be getting into wearing a coloured ribbon of some sort. I feel bad because I'm not wearing one which I can't help but think sends the message that I must be for smacking my bitch up, or breast cancer, or Aids. Now I'm pretty sure, as long as my arse faces south, that no one is 'for' these terrible things, but you sure do feel like a prick for not owning a ribbon. I feel the same about anyone who doesn’t wear a poppy on ANZAC day, they must be Nazi lovers.

Maybe to detract from the fact that I’m not wearing a ribbon of any sort, I should go and stand somewhere with my willy hanging out of my fly and call it 'art'? Hey, if a fruity Spaniard can get away with it as part of Wellington’s art festival then what can't you get away? I love the write ups that pre-empt nut bars like these too; 'he's challenging the perception of art as we know it'. No, he's not. He's standing in a darkened room with his chopper out.

Try that same technique on your nearest street corner and see how far it gets you. A few weeks ago some French tart chartered a plane and flew a bunch of goldfish in bowls across the Tasman. She filmed this groundbreaking piece of history and showed it to anyone silly enough to pay the entrance fee. All under the guise of 'art'.

I might be a simple lad from Naenae but I know art when I see it. The Sistine chapel is art. The Mona Lisa is art. The Andy Warhol inspired, colours reversed self portrait my son drew at school a year or two back that hangs in our garage, is art. Standing with meat and two vege out in a darkened room of Dixon Street, is not. It might be some Gaylord getting his willies at you checking out his willy, but art it is not. Art, like fashion, is an inbred private joke at the best of times, you either get it or you don’t, but rocking out with your cock out is a lame excuse for a lack of creativity.

Maybe we should wire his testes to the mains for an hour. And call it 'art'.