Not A Real Job...

So movie award season has come and gone again and thank fuck for that.

Only the fashion industry surpasses their movie counterparts for gratuitous self congratulation and yet both are one big inside joke that we common folk don’t get. So you made two, maybe three decent movies in a year? Get over it.

I think things like the Academy Awards should be held every four years, like every other actual celebration of achievement i.e. sports. Because swanning around for three months in makeup speaking the lines someone else has written for you is not something worth celebrating every year, it really isn’t.

But like fashion, it’s the industry built upon the industry that laps this shit up. What would that silly bitch from TV3 do for example, if there were no award ceremonies for her to swan around at pretending she’s on txting terms with the A list? Heaven forbid they might have to replace her slot with something newsworthy.

What would the E Channel do without the source for their endless drivel about who wore what and then did whom? What would Ryan Seacrest do for fucks sake if he didn’t have The Dictator accidentally pouring Kim Jong’s ashes all over his perfect suit? Mind you, I’d tune in to see something like that every year, the highlight of this years ceremony.

What would we do as a nation if our small minds couldn’t get excited about the fact that some NZ company is up for ‘Best Catering’ or something on Tintin? Weta would still win shit but then they’re awesome. Where else would Brett McKenzie get to play the quintessential simple Kiwi boy? Again.

And just on that, why is it that actors continue to perpetuate the whole Muppet myth long after the cameras have stopped rolling? Why do they even buy into it in the first place? We all know they’re puppets, heck even the puppets know they’re fucken puppets, so why pretend they’re great actors or performers and it’s an honour working with them?

But just in case you needed further proof that the whole thing is arse then look no further at the latest post ceremony viral sensation: Angelina Jolie's superimposed right leg everywhere. It’s garnering more interest and hits than the awards themselves. Yep. Somebody is laughing but it ain’t you or me.

One of the most nominated flicks this year was a black and white silent film. That's right, two hours of silence in a room full of people masticating. Least they could have done was coloured the damn thing. But it's a novelty isn't it? No one is going to say a bad thing about it because it dares to be different. It dares to be bold. It proves the industry has run out of ideas is what it is.

Oh and the speeches and the tears and the emotion. Don't you just want someone to break it all up by yelling out "But it's not a real job, you cunt". But they never do.

Like I said, an in joke that none of us are in on.

"Muppets I say. Farken Muppets."

Football from Heaven

Non sports fans bear with me just for a moment. As usual croquet fans, there will be fuck all for you in this blog.

Quite possibly one of the best displays of football took place yesterday morning. Beautiful Barcelona played one of the best, yet gayest, teams in the world, Real Madrid, who just happen to be coached by one of the best in the business, Jose Mourinho, the self appointed ‘Special One’.

Barca demolished the pretty Madristas. Absolutely blitzed them. Made them look like part timers. Five nil once it was all over and 98,000 fans - yes that’s right; the stadium holds that many - went home to hit the piss deliriously happy.

Meanwhile, back in little ol NZ we followers of football made our way to work and cracked one under the desks as the goals keep rolling in via the live text updates on the world wide intraweb. The one thing we have to live for at moments of inappropriate arousal like this is that we’ll be able to catch the goals on the telly during the lunch time news.

Only today they had other priorities, like fucken cricket.

The Ashes to be exact, contested between two countries that aren’t even New Zealand! I know we’ve got a lot of Poms and Aussies here but fuck ‘em, Brisbane is three hours away by plane, if they want to catch the score they can piss off and go get it in person.

And why is some guy named Michael Hussey called ‘Mr Cricket’? Did he invent the game? I think not. It strikes me as one of those nicknames you give yourself to appear way cooler than you actually are. Mine was GreatBigHardCock.

Mind you, if you’ve been called ‘hussy’ all your life anything will do. Just ask my first shag; Tracey, from Waipawa.

So fuck you very much TV3. I’ve seen the game and the goals now but I shan’t be watching your lunch time news ever again which is okay by me because TV1 has a far sexier financial news presenter before the sports news anyway.

Barca vs.Madrid. Quite possibly the best football you’ll never see (unless you have Sky).

Five star Barca - better than a Hussey anyday.

People Power Gets Shit Done

If there are two guaranteed ways to get things done in life its a) Slavery and b) Piss enough of the people off.

Cadbury found out about the latter these past few weeks when they tried to sneakily – and it was sneaky – change the way they made chocolate by substituting cocoa butter with palm oil. Not only did this change the flavour and texture of the chocolate but it pissed off those that who gorge themselves to morbid obesity on the stuff and if there’s one rule of Fat Club it’s don’t mess with a fatties food supply.

It also pissed off the Greenies (and those that look for any cause that will allow them to pretend that they care for the environment) because of the way unsustainable palm oil is obtained. And we all know there’s no bigger set of moaners than Greenies. Students are a close second but surprisingly they didn’t get in on this one.

Cadbury, possibly realising very early on that they had stuffed up, tried their best to make like the brown stuff hadn’t hit the fan. They wheeled out the smarmiest PR man they could find to try and tell us that sales weren’t down and that people – and by that he meant fatties – would soon get over it. They didn’t and the sales for Cadbury dropped, substantially. Whittaker’s on the other hand were quick to announce that their sales were at an all time high and you didn’t need to be a moaning student to work out why.

So this week Cadbury gorged themselves on humble pie and announced that they’re now bringing back the butter, just like Marlon Brando did in Last Tango in Paris. Only he planned to use his for anal sex, which is a lot like what Cadbury were trying to do to its customer base when you think about it.

That night the news broke some sheila from some inconsequential organisation, possibly a Green one, was on the news trumpeting how people power had won the day and how it was the ‘first turn around of its kind by a multinational organisation’. The fuck it was.

Coca Cola had to concede a similar defeat in the early eighties when they changed the taste of Coke. It caused such an uproar that there was an orchestrated ground swell of support against the company that was bigger than any Facebook group you could join today. Eventually, in the face of massive sale losses in the height of the Cola wars Coke did the rightful thing and reverted back to the original recipe under the label ‘Coke Classic’. Eventually that too was phased out and Coke became plain old Coke again. The people had fought back and won.

In more recent times Metallica, the rock band of the same name and in itself a multinational entity, were so moved by the fans dislike of the Load album which they released in the mid nineties that they immediately recorded and released a heavier, more traditional sounding follow up, Reload.

Metallica were no doubt wary of the need to appease the many millions of disgruntled bogans, who are deceptively dangerous when pissed off. Maybe its the years of wearing super taper jeans and the lack of oxygen to the brain that causes it but an angry bogan can often make a weapon out of the most innocent of inianimate objects, like a can of petrol or unwarrented, unregistered Ford Escort.

Now here in little ol NZ we don’t have the numbers to make just such a stand but if enough folk complain loud enough shit gets done. Like the large number of Golden Oldies that complained when TVNZ tried cutting back on Coronation Street coverage some years ago, or TV3s rescinding on similarly trying to dump the TV series Underbelly last year because they figured no one was watching it.

Complaining, making a fuss and a stand, often makes a difference. I think that as a collective massive we don’t pack enough of a tanty to influence more companies that cash in on our indifference to getting shafted up the rusty sheriff’s badge. But not me, I lap that shit up.

I make a point of never returning to places that give bad service. I don’t buy products that change their make up so much that they are not the same product at all and no, I don’t care how ‘new and improved’ the packaging is. When a company tries to pull a fast one like Cadbury on me I take the moral high ground and self impose a boycott on all their products, not just the obvious ones.

My protests might be minor and inconsequential in the grand scale of thousand unit sales but just imagine if we all did that? Imagine if we did that with alcohol, junk food and everything else that shits society right up.

We, like the Cadbury chocolate eating fatties, would get shit done.

The Joe Karam Show Begins...

Joe Karam is finally a free man, acquitted of the crimes he was imprisoned for some 13 years ago.

So too is a fella by the name of David Bain but the way the decision was captured you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the cheeky darky Karam who has spent most of those 15 years behind bars and not the palungi Bain. TV cameras were allowed in when the verdict was read on Friday and rather than focusing on David - at least on TV3 anyway - they were focused on Karam, who rather humorously spilt water all over himself in excitement.

An impromptu press conference held on the steps of the Christchurch High Court was just the start of The Joe Karam Show. Understandably the six foot Bain, he of the huge ears, was too distraught with relief to speak, so Joe did all the talking. You would think that after 13 years of wrongful imprisonment Big D might have something to say, but no. JK on the other hand had lots to say and man can that guy talk.

He continued the sermon with Harae Mai John Campbell. Now the top shelf had been flowing since 5pm so Joe waxed on about several things, mostly himself, none of which really made much sense. In his defence though he did say at one stage that "this is all about David really" but no one seemed to notice so on he waxed. Only when Harae Mai John interviewed the two QCs did we finally get a full understanding of just how hard the team had to work to get where they were that Friday night.

Karam meanwhile, just in camera, stumbled off into the background and almost fell through the hotel rooms closed ranch slider. He had already made his first 'Hurricane' reference whilst being interviewed by Marvelous JC but you can bet it wasn't his first that night. It's a reference he likes to make often - that the case of David Bain is the same as that of Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, a black man who was falsely imprisoned for a triple murder he never committed 1966.

Bob Dylan wrote a song about the case and a movie was made starring Denzil Washington. Karam must have liked the movie because he once flew Carter over to meet Bain whilst he was still in jail. Carter is undoubtedly an inspiring individual but the case of a man imprisoned because of the colour of his skin is slightly different to the case of David Bain. No word yet if Washington will play Karam in the movie of David Bain.

Now I should officially go no record as confessing that I have always believed Bain knocked off his family. I've read both books - including Karams - and being someone who likes to know the facts of such things I was convinced by what I had read that the man in the naff homespuns was convicted fairly. It took 13 years for those facts to be challenged and revealed to be in some cases far from factual which unfortunately does throw the Crowns case into doubt. Fridays verdict doesn't necessarily prove that Bain was wrongly imprisoned because he was innocent, more that the case against him was not good enough to prove he was guilty. Funnily enough many people feel the same about Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter.

Still, despite the acquittals, Bain still can't seem to shake controversy. Two jurors not only embraced him after the verdicts on Friday, but later that evening appeared at the 'Camp David' after party. Incidentally the 'Camp' reference refers to the American Presidential retreat of the same name and not the fact that Bain and Karam appear to be close. Very close. Now that would be camp.

The actions of the jurors, however niave, captures in a nutshell what most of us suspected regarding the retrial; that Bain had a huge amount of sympathy amongst a generation that didn't really know much more about the fella than Joe Karam's Hurricane references and the images of him in those homespuns. That was going to count for more in a retrail than any debate over the size of a bloody footprint.

But you can put your money on one thing; the Joe Karam showing is just cranking up. I suspect the first book on the acquittal will be either be by him or about him. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a combination of the two. Bain meanwhile is a free man and good luck to him.

Shit is going to get really interesting though if one day he knocks off Joe and his family...

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.

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.

Vote For Anyone But Gaylord Gayford

Clark Gayford optimises the New Zealand B Grade celebrity. He's also, which ever way you look at it, one letter away from being Clarke Gaylord, which is about as funny as the guy gets really. He's been on the radio and he's been on the TV, but it seems that’s not enough for the boy from Gizzie.

Gaylord started out as a member of The Edge breakfast crew, the radio station that pioneered having three fuckwits talk each over other for three hours each morning as you prepare for work, where you'll probably spend the day amongst several fuckwits arguing over each other. He then moved onto TV and was one of the very first hosts on C4 where he played the 'sarcastic guy', a role that could have been funny, but wasn't. He then went on to have a bit part hosting 'Holiday', the travel show on Prime watched by millions.

Now I could go on and on about the guy's history but I won't. Partly because a) there’s not much more to tell and b) you can check it out yourself though by reading his Wikipedia entry which I highly suspect he’s written himself. Now that's the real beauty of a world wide wiki, you can be world famous without anyone else knowing.

Gaylord has one hidden talent; he's a doppelganger of the Aussie singer Pete Murray who's songs your girlfriend probably quite likes and can be found on just about every 'chill out' and 'weekend surf' compilation going. I quite like Pete Murray. I've seen him live and he is one of those real singers who can actually sing the songs he writes. He's also pretty cool and the kind of guy you wish you could swap bodies with for a few days because you suspect he gets his - and quite possibly all your - share of the pootang. And you wondered why yours dried up aye?

Anyhoo, this look a likeness led to the only genuine funny Gaylord moment I can recount. In one episode of some C4 show he co hosted there was an ongoing reference made to the similarity, much to Gaylord’s frustration. All this ribbing culminated near the end of the show in one of the most magical moments in New Zealand’s short history of telly. The camera slowly pans away from Murray (who was touring NZ at the time) to a wide shot of he and Gaylord sitting together on Queens Wharf looking quizzically each other as two people who look a lot alike, tend to do the moment they realise they could be brothers from another mother. Absolutely brilliant. I’ve wet myself just writing this. You had to have watched it I suppose.

Fast forward to now and Gaylord is again on TV and in the news. He has entered the online competition to win the so called ‘best job in the world’, a six-month caretaker position at Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The ‘dream job’ pays NZ$193,000 dollars a year, which seems to me to be an exorbitant amount of money to pay someone who will spend their days telling off puffy, pale English tourists for pissing in the water and killing off the coral, but hey, what do I know? The global recession doesn’t appear to have gotten as far as the Great Barrier Reef it would seem.

TV3 news played Gaylord’s audition tape which was a very polished entry, but then it would be because clearly Gaylord has used the considerable resources available to him as a TV3 / C4 staff member to make it. A luxury that I doubt was available to the other 34,000 applicants that didn’t make the final 50. Gaylord does admit to feeling a ‘wee bit guilty’ to having a ‘few more skills up his sleeve’ than other applicants, but justifies it by revealing that this really, really is his dream job. Oh and he really likes fishing.

Who decided that fishing would make for entertaining TV aye? Lets be honest, even if you do enjoy sitting for eight hours on a boat waiting to catch all of three fish, watching someone else do it on TV is pretty bloody boring. One of the local hosts of just such a program has struck it big by jumping out of helicopters onto unsuspecting big game fish. He was even on Letterman thanks to his YouTube exploits. He reckons he does it to raise awareness of fishing and the delicate matter of how we’re raping the sea of all its resources. I wonder if he’d be keen to progress to the next worthy cause; Quadriplegia. He could jump out of helicopters onto unsuspecting pedestrians, thus making tetraplegics of them both.

Now Gaylord has a job that most of us would quite fancy. He might have got there, like the song says, by sucking a lot of dick, or he might have got there through sheer hard work, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. In any case, I think it’s more than ‘a bit cheeky’ of him to then use the privileges that come with that one job to get another that will make him a shitload of cash. Will all those that helped him get this far get a cut of the 200k he could earn if he wins the competition? I doubt it. No what they’ll actually end up getting is lots of emails from Gaylord, containing lots of photos of Gaylord standing knee deep in the Great Barrier reef with a big Gaylord stiffy. What a guy.

I don’t know how many votes I get to cast but they’ll all be for the other buggers and thankfully others share the same thought because currently Gaylord is a long way back in the polls. Good fucken job.

Clarke Gaylord, back on your Prime TV screens sooner than you, or he, thinks.

The Dog Has Bigger Balls Than I

Another moment of groundbreaking television took place last night when, right slap bang in the middle of your average households meal time we were bought the news item on Muzza, the dog that had his man berries removed. Which in itself is nothing to report on but just in case you hadn't regurgitated all that you'd eaten at this stage, we got to see him have implants tacked on in their place.

Now I could start on a serious thing about just how this shit gets on the news ahead of any number of world events that are far more newsworthy, but I won’t. Instead, let me ask of you a few pertinent questions:

a) Do you walk around looking dog’s bollocks?
b) If you do would you then own up to being someone who checks out dogs balls by pointing out that you've just seen one that doesn't have any?
c) Even if you did do all of the above, do you think the dog that you've just seen without any gives a shit?

Who thinks this shit up, I mean really? Who decided that there was a market for silicon testes on dogs? Emasculated owners who worry that a lack of plums on their pets might reflect badly on people’s opinions of theirs, that’s who. Hey, these teabags wouldn't fly if there wasn't a market for them would they? And so there we have it, final proof then that pet worship has finally crossed the boundary of compulsive obsessive to downright disturbing.

The only thing that could make this any worse is if we were to presume that the reason the guy wants his four legged friend to have gnad implants is so that he can feel them banging against his............nah, lets not go there.

Now admittedly I'm awfully fond of our two cats but I'm not so obsessed with their well being that I'm about to attach a couple of ping pong balls between their legs. Especially not on our female cat and not just because she's a girl, but because it's just too fucken much. It's a sad day when our own physical neuroses are passed to our pets. What's next aye, false teets on bitches?

Maybe I'm just a little 'teste' about testes. I think it all harks back to the day I was visiting the type of medical facility - for reasons we won't go into - where a fella can whack one out into a cup and not only will he not get into trouble for it, he'll be thanked for not spilling any over the side! Incidentally the set up at these types of places is usually a lazy boy off in a small room with a selection of stick mags and a box of tissues. Tough break if print porn is not your thing but great news if you have a tissue fetish.

I actually stumbled upon the room when looking for the toilet because strangely enough it makes up part of the mens room - you walk through the mastabatorium to get to the pisser. Funny thing was after finding the reading material next to the tissues I didn't really need to go pee any more....

But the real highlight of the visit was the consultation with some doctor whose name escapes me – probably due to the traumatic moment I am about to describe - but I suspect it was either 'Fingers' or 'Peter File'. His party trick was a surprise teste inspection that he decided would be prudent 10 minutes into our consultation and even before I could quip something witty like 'Doc I thought you were crazy but now I can see you're nuts', he had mine in his hands which the bastard never washed before he started.

To add insult to injury he made some passing comment about them being smaller than usual but to this day I stand by my reasons for them being so which were threefold; it was cold in his office, I had a massive pube on and yours would be too if some guy you had only just met started fondling yours.

Maybe I should think about implants....

Weetbix, Telethon and Titties.

Whoever said that fibre was good for you clearly hadn’t eaten four weetbix a day, every day, for breakfast when they made that statement.

I have - and my sphincter is not thanking me for it. I told my mate at work about it the other day and he told me that he felt sorry for my toilet. Feel no pity for the carzie my friends, it is porcelain after all and quite frankly is built for this shit, literally. Unfortunately the soft pink tissue that makes up the rim of my anus is not. Infact, the term ‘ropeburn’ springs to mind.

Pink toilet paper never really caught on did it? No one minded having it on the roll so much I think, it was more the case that used pink toilet paper shows up a lot more easily when washed out to see than white. That aspect of it never really caught on at all the popular swim beaches that’s for sure.

Now I’ve been chowing down on NZs favourite breakfast – and how the fuck do they know, have they asked everybody? – on account of it’s Stat Attack trading card time again and as readers of this blog know, or the owners of kids can attest, they’re like gold up and down the playgrounds of Aotearoa. Honestly, the things I do for that boy of mine. My old man would never have been so forthcoming. He would have told me to stop being a bloody poof over some poofy cards and given me ten lashings across the bare buttocks with his leather belt just for good measure.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I continued to wet my bed well into my teens. It only finally stopped the day I landed in ‘Nam. You don’t dare wet your bed whilst in ‘Nam. Charlie can smell Caucasian urine a mile away, even closer if you ate asparagus the night before. And don’t even think about taking a dump whilst on patrol. You either hold that turtle head in till you get back to the firebase or you eat it whilst it’s warm. For many years even after I returned to civilisation I continued to drink my own whizz, not because I had to but just because I liked the taste. War does that to a man.

WeetBix have always been associated with trading cards. Remember how every pack back in the day had a couple from some series that you never ever had the chance of completing. By the time you got through the box and bought another, the 30 card set of World War Two fighter planes that you were really gagging to complete had long gone and you were forced into starting on some gay set of trains, castles or seabirds. I don’t think there actually ever was a complete set of World War Two fighter planes; it was all a ruse created to disappoint heterosexual boys.

Another blast from the past is making its way back in 2009 - Telethon! How good was Telethon aye? 48 hours of crazy, wacky, hi-jinks perpetuated by New Zealand’s own B, C and D grade celebrities mixed in with a few nobodies from overseas from shows you never really watched anyway. Throw in hourly performances from the local line dancing troupe, crochet club and that mute juggler from Cuba Mall and you really had the precursor to the TV show that has become NZ Has Got Talent.

If you were really lucky you got to stay up late and watch the really risqué stuff that happened when all those celebrities stopped drinking coffee to stay awake and turned to the top shelf booze to keep them ‘spontaneous’. It was only then that they’d shave off each others moustaches and play that lame game where you pass the piece of fruit around the room using your neck cause it made it look like you were giving each other a hicky. Man that was some wacky backy stuff wasn’t it?! Whew, good times.

Let’s face it, everything between the first and last hour of every Telethon was shit and its not going to hold up to today’s standard of entertainment unless it starts, continues and finishes with one main ingredient; Titties. Lots of them, preferably naked but I think most of us will take what we can get on whomever they can get. Actually titties are so good that I’m genuinely surprised we’re having a Telethon because I think they could quite possibly cure the cancer they’re going to try and raise money for.

This thought occurred to me the other day when far from there being thousands out in Auckland protesting the Boobs on Bikes parade, there were actually thousands out supporting it, taking every vantage point possible and all of them getting more of an eyeful than I ever did when I snuck a peak at the Page 3 girl in the Sunday paper Dad always used to buy along with a loaf of unsliced fresh bread.

Now if only Weetbix did a Tittie Attack series of collector’s cards……

Small Man Syndrome

A tighty whitey singlet – made famous by the likes of Jake the Muss – is commonly known here in NZ as a ‘wife beater’, but I propose that from this week on it’s referred to as a ‘Tony Veitch’. Let this go on record as being the first official bad taste use of the Tony Veitch affair.

Veitch finally came out and admitted what some already knew about NZs favourite – or most irritating depending which channel you watch the news on each night - small man; that yes, about a year ago, he did infact give his then missus a good kicking. Apparently this was one of those dirty little secrets that people within the circle of trust that is the B & C grade NZ celebrity scene had known for some time but it took the Dom Post to splash it across their front page Monday morning before we, the working class folk with normal jobs and normal lives were to find out that Mr Veitch is not so far removed from us at all.

Veitch – usually impossible to shut up – kept quiet all week before finally fronting up to the same sort of press conference he has so often been on the other side of and you could bloody tell too - his statement reeked of having watched one too many media conferences held by the high profile sportspeople that he spends all day talking, writing and wanking about. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see that several of them now sue the guy for outright plagiarism. I can hardly blame him for pinching their work though, I'm guessing it wasn't something he ever expected to have to do when he paid his battered and broken girlfriend a hundred thousand grand to shut the hell up about it all a few years ago.

The token gesture of having his current wife stand behind him as he made it was as convincing as the time Hilary stood behind Bill the day he finally revealed that he and Monica had poked, rather than toked, the cigar they shared that time they were alone in the oval office. In his impassioned plea for leniency, Veitch revealed that he was on medication and under immense pressure from two stressful jobs at the time, which explains the Once Were Warriors re-enactment that night. A good story and almost believable (although not condonable even if it were true) were it not for the fact that talking on the radio and reading the sports headlines on the TV each night are hardly right up there in terms of stressful jobs. Try having to scrape people off the road, run into burning buildings or jump start dead hearts before you reel that sob story out Tony, you tit.

What Veitch does to earn the considerable amount of wedge he earns shouldn’t be confused with those things in term of importance, because they’re not even fucking close. Guys like Veitch might think that the world of current affairs might stop were he to fall of the face of the earth (chance would be a fine thing) but alas, it won’t. It’s this sense of inflated self importance that leads a guy like him to think that it’s okay to buy off any mistakes he might make. His job is easy money and he knows it. The long line of dudes standing behind the small man currently in the chair, just waiting to take his place know it too and that’s why Veitch hoped he could pay his way out of this one, because annoying sports anchors are a dime a dozen.

He might think that a smart suit, a well scripted 5 minutes of bullshit and a steadfast wife standing by might get him back on the telly but those that pay his wage will have other ideas. They know only too well that the backlash from a public that view him as a wife beater means a loss in viewer ship or listener ship and thus ultimately in advertising revenue. This is not adultery we’re talking about here either, this is an actual crime (assault) that Veitch has managed to pay his way out of and its hard to see the man getting any sympathy even if he is a dwarf. Ironically TV3 took great pleasure in running the piece as one of its top stories each night, whereas TV1 didn’t’ want to touch it with a barge pole. The same thing happened in reverse a few years back when then TV3 sports anchor Clint Brown had a few too many in Taupo, but then he only took a swipe at another fella, Veitch smacked his bitch up.

The real problem is that Veitch suffers from – amongst a myriad of other issues I’m sure – small man syndrome, an affliction common in those that have spent their life looking up at real men. It leads most man midgets to believe that almost everything is about them. Like the guy I know who suffers from the same affliction and who my boys gave a soccer lesson to his boys last season. He did what all small men do in the face of adversary; he got fired up and started ranting and raving. Not a good look on the sideline of an eight year olds soccer game. Luckily his wife wasn’t there; she would have gone home in a wheelchair.

“Geez that poo chick from Wheel of Fortune annoys me, I feel like giving her a right Tony Veitching” – second official bad taste use of the Tony Veitch affair.

The Miracle Of Prime Time Porn

A moment of divine intervention fell upon the country this past Sunday and surprisingly it didn’t involve a crying statue of The Virgin Mary or a bleeding portrait of Jesus.

Instead there was 3 minutes 50 seconds of hardcore porn broadcast on free to air TV channel Prime in the middle of a cold, lazy hazy Sunday afternoon. Those that had huddled around the box to watch the latest instalment of Grass Roots Rugby, got a little more ‘root’ than they bargained for when inexplicably, their viewing was interrupted by a scene from Desperate Black Wives II. Now I know what you’re thinking and yes, I was surprised too, to learn that there was a sequel.

Parents watching Prime with their children were appalled. Wives slammed the TV3 (the parent company of Prime) switchboard with calls of complaints whilst fathers sent the children to their rooms so they could watch the offending material alone. TV3 ran a disappointingly small part of the offending footage as one of their lead stories that night on their 6pm news. Personally I was appalled at what I saw. The woman shown on the screen, though skillful with her application of the whipped cream to a fella’s pixelated dickie was alas white, not black. Needless to say I called TV3 in disgust at the blatant misrepresentation of the facts.

The official word on how it happened is that the feed from Sky’s adult channel got cross wired with the Prime channel. My white arse it did. I suspect like all good employers, Prime has a weekend skeleton crew consisting of low paid, low intellect staff and the good ol boys watching the porn tried to see if they could get it on the big screen. It stayed like that for nearly four minutes till their game of soggy biscuit was over and someone realised that the screen showing the Prime channel was no longer just showing guys in short shorts reaching between each others legs and grabbing balls.

This is the kind of stuff we fella’s grow up dreaming will one day happen. That one day free to air porn will just start showing and all will be good in the world. Its right up there on the list of hopeless male fantasies that will never happen, with other gems like the endless hope that some day a sexy shop assistant will offer to try on the skimpy outfit you’re planning to buy your girlfriend because she’s ‘about her size’.

The closest I ever got to that happening was the day I was waiting for my wife to try something on in Sussan and an attractive young lady exited a changing cubicle clad in only the skimpiest set of pyjamas, the type you usually only see on feminine hygiene ads. You know the ones, where girls have sleepovers, pillow fights, shave each others legs and practise their pashing on one another? Her mate was waiting next to me to critique the outfit choice and it’s fair to say she got the big thumbs up from the both of us.

Which is not quite the same as when the sales assistant in Glassons asked me whilst I waited for my wife outside the changing rooms another time, if what it read on my tee shirt – Big Cock (my local Asian takeaway) – was true or not? Needless to say the answer I gave her was not the same as the one I gave the heavily tattooed carnie who screamed it out across the field where the circus was laid out on the Napier foreshore another time. He thought it was funny, I thought he had remarkably good eyesight for a wanker.

All of which reminds me of the one time Coops crashed over at my place one weekend and we stayed up all night watching Jean Claude Van Damme and Arnie movies – as we did back in them days. We’d gotten our hands on one of the shared skin flicks too that was doing the rounds so what with that, the Muscles from Brussels and half a dozen Double Browns we had quite the night planned. Thing is, neither of us wanted to watch the porno together so it was a battle of wits to see who would stay awake the longest and this watch it alone. I won, but I was only a few segments of poor tracking in when two girls decided on a bit of anal bead action. I know what it is now of course, but back then it was just wrong so naturally I woke Coops up and we proceeded to watch the rest of it together, in our sleeping bags, with our knees bent.

Apparently Primes miracle was only broadcast in the Auckland region meaning the rest of us good folk gagging for a bit of hard core during a lazy Sunday never got to see it anyway. But I’m not taking any chances. Just today I went out and bought a 14 inch, a DVD recorder and a stack of blank DVDs that I plan to set up and record Prime around the clock.

And I don’t mind waiting because 3 minutes 50 is just about all I’ll need I reckon.

Reading Between The Lines

Some things never change no matter where you are. Like daytime TV – shit whether you’re at home on the couch because you’ve pulled a sickie, or on a hospital bed because you are a sickie. Admittedly I didn’t watch a lot of TV whilst in hospital, but some of the stuff I did was even more disturbing than the abnormal interest my Asian physio had in examining my phlegm each morning.

TV1 news for example, now gives us the weather before, during and after the news. That’s the same weather forecast three times in an hour. Now I would’ve thought that by now, after about 40 years of it having been done the same way each and every night that people would know that the weather is covered in the last ten minutes of the news. If you haven’t figured that out by now then let’s be honest, it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference whether it’s raining or sunny tomorrow because in all probability you are a Mongol and will dress / plan / venture inappropriately regardless of the overhead conditions. Just because your audience is getting dumber TV1, doesn’t mean you have to.

And I love how both channels – TV1 and TV3 – show the same news shots from the same event and try to claim it as ‘exclusive footage’. Did they not see each other standing there whilst they were filming or what? And just because your camera is ten metres closer than the other network’s doesn't mean you can claim to be the ‘first to bring it to you’ either! Munters.

Mind you TV3 aren’t far off having the dudes from Play School present their shows either. Their V8 Supercars coverage on Sundays is presented by the morning crew from The Rock radio station. If you’re not a big fan of the unoriginal Rock team then you’re fucked really, because now they’re on your TV too, lead by Rog, the tiny unattractive man with a voice that sounds like he needs a wheelbarrow to carry his humongous gnads around. He doesn’t, incidentally, because they’re not humongous but it makes you wonder why he, a man with a face for radio, got the job and not some up and coming presenter with a future in the bizzo?

The only saving grace for that lot is Tracy Donaldson gets to be on camera and she’s every bit as good looking as she sounds on the radio. She’s a blondie too which means she has a 95% better chance of appearing on the cover of Cleo than a brunette. I know this because a) I’ve made this observation before in a previous blog and b) thanks to the generous stack of glossy mags I had to work through whilst in hospital I can confirm that nothing has changed. Both Cleo and Cosmo had their usual blond it girl on the cover and inside, pages and pages of how to look like her. They also had in depth earth shattering articles on how to get the career you want. The big secret is just to be yourself. Genius. But now I’m confused – is it try to look like Kate Heigel, or be myself?! Oh fuck. And what if I’m a ginga that looks nothing like Kaye Heigel – is there any hope for me?!

Cleo also had an insightful piece on what guys want in a girl. It looked to me as though the guys were actually asked ‘what gives you a stiffy?’ because the answers were pretty stock standard; nice figure, great legs, firm boobs. Dave on the other hand, liked ‘dresses with flowers on them’, which made me think Dave hadn’t been vetted very well for his sexual preference because I don’t think it was girlies.

Cleo also had their most ‘full on’ sealed section ever, which contained 93 sexpert tricks written by actual pornstars, strippers and sexperts. It contained gems like ‘do it in a public place’, take it ‘slow and steady’ and try ‘using no hands’. Despite having several multiple orgasms by just reading the damn thing I couldn’t help but feel that by using the term ‘full on’ Cleo had reset the bar when it comes to bullshitting their readership. There weren’t even 93 tips either! Just because your audience is getting dumber Cleo, doesn’t mean you have to too.

I wonder if Cleo and Cosmo get the same guy to write their sealed sections as FHM and Ralph do to write their erotic stories. Although FHM try to make like theirs is written by a dirty girl, one who makes good use of her Thesaurus because I for one never knew there were quite so many words that meant ‘ejaculate’. Maybe it’s something that’s only taught in ‘fat guys who want to talk dirty online’ school.

There’s actually very little difference between the likes of Cleo and the likes of FHM. They contain lots of what’s cool, lots of innuendo and lots of girls wearing very little. FHM and Ralph do actually have some interesting stuff in them but it’s buried beneath all the soft porn. Barmaids and girls next door in bikinis were great ten years ago but that was before a little thing called the Internet came along – you may have heard of it – and started delivering free porn daily in any flavour you liked. Surely these lads’ mags are fighting a losing battle for sales because I reckon if you’ve seen one pretty girl holding her naked milkers you’ve seen them all.

What they should do is cut out all the soft porn, seal their issues up each month in a plastic bag and include on the inside a free one time log in to a porn site of your choosing. Now that would be worth $8.

John Campbell Blows. Himself.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to see a guy give himself a blowie – and let’s be honest, who hasn’t – then tune into TV3 at 7pm each week night. John Campbell might not physically be able to pull it off, but he always has that look of someone who just did.

If I was to be honest, I’d have to admit that I usually don’t mind John. I’m not likely to put a photo of him on my ceiling above the bed anytime soon, but I can handle him in small doses. John is the kind of guy that uses pigeon Maori a lot so as to appear a genuine Kiwi bloke. The thing is John, genuine Kiwi blokes, like myself, don’t actually use any pigeon Maori unless we’re mocking that one dimensional character on Bro Town, but there you go.

John doesn’t wear a tie with his suit so as to appear casually relaxed, but at the same time, seriously anally uptight over the news of the day. John pushes the boundry of decency by sometimes saying some soft core profanity like ‘bugger’ and ‘bastard’, and gets away with it because he’s always smiling when he does. John’s the kind of guy you would hear shorten names like ‘Noel Leemings’ to ‘Noels’ because he thinks it makes him sound more Kiwi, when in fact it makes him sound like a twat, as does anyone who shortens the name of an appliance store.

But John is a hard core reporter who lives life on the edge. This week he had one of the scrotes that pulled the Waiouru museum robbery appear incognito on his show. That’s right, New Zealand’s most wanted man, who to date has evaded capture, sitting casually in a studio with the tie less John Campbell. The perp was so well disguised with his hoodie on, face blurred out and voice changed that it could almost have been anybody. It’s almost unbelievable, but it had to be true because John had his serious frown on and never once did he turn it upside down.

Needless to say the Cops were interested to speak with John the next day and so they did, turning up at the TV3 studios with a warrant. John probably welcomed them with a ‘Kia Ora’ and called them all ‘maaate’. This of course made the lead story of TV3 News and not unsurprisingly the lead story on John’s program too. It was right at that moment, that I realised the only way John could have been giving himself a bigger gob job was if he had had a couple of ribs removed so that he could fully deep throat his bad self.

For a start, there is no two sided story to be told here. The pussies that robbed the museum did so for personal gain and desecrated the memory of men with vastly bigger testes than they. Men who fought in World Wars won those medals whilst doing their duty so that these pricks could have the freedom they clearly don’t seem to enjoy having today. That, in my opinion, makes those that took the medals public enemy number one and no one with an ounce of national pride would hesitate in calling the bastards in were they to come face to face with them.

But then that says a lot about Harae Mai John I guess. Him and his station are now hiding behind journalistic principals and stoutly promising not to reveal their sources, which I could understand if they had just prevented a huge injustice from happening, but they haven’t. What they’ve done is man milked a gutless crime for as much airtime as they could and poor old John has the lockjaw to prove it.

Reporters, or rather the guys who sit at the desk with someone else’s hand up their rectum and read an autocue should stick to reading the news, not trying to make it. And what about the lawyer who we’re supposed to believe is a hero because he got the medals back? Apparently he did the same to some rare paintings that were nicked a few years back too. I reckon that makes him either extremely resourceful to be in the right place at the right time - not once but twice - or a decidedly jammy bastard who shouldn’t be trusted. He is a lawyer after all.

Personally I hope the boys in blue put all the pricks in jail for obstructing justice and then we can have a new public health poster that reads something like “This is your anus before journalistic integrity” and “This is your anus after you go to jail for journalistic integrity”.

Kiaora John, you tit.