Do Not Adjust Your Set.

My devoted faithful followers (or at the very least the five of you I’ve sent this new link to) will have perhaps wondered if you have stepped across some time and space continuum where the blog you’re now reading is very similar to one you used to read, only different. It is as we say at work; same shit, different toilet.

Fear not, an episode of Lost this aint. God I miss you Kate.

No this is just me stepping back into the shadows, out of the limelight, back inside the sanctum. Oscar Wilde once said that it was better to be spoken about that not to be spoken of at all and he was a right fruity bugger (or rather buggerer) so he should know.

In some instances I would agree with that sentiment but this blog was only ever meant to be an outlet for my over-active imagination, crazy logic and Vietnam flashbacks. How it got to be on everybody’s daily reading list I don’t know but that put me in the rather precarious position of having folk potentially mistaking my pisstaking for genuine opinion and I’m not having that. Not on my watch.

So enough already. I’m closing in the Sanctum to just a select few, like it should be. And if this gets out I know just who’s letterbox to shit in and which email address to sign up to the daily porn site.

As you were. And hey, let’s be careful out there.

Skip The Light Fandango

One of my favorite tunes on the wireless at the moment is a lovely wee ditty called ‘The A Team’ by a fella named Ed Sheeran.

You’ve probably heard it and / or seen the music video, it’s quite good. Unfortunately despite the title it has nothing to do with the most awesome and possibly best TV series ever of the same name…

It’s one of those songs that talks about angels and stuff and will undoubtedly be played at weddings by couples who haven’t listened well enough to realise the song is in fact about a homeless girl who sells herself to pay for her drug habit. Hence the line ‘she’s in the Class A team’ which has nothing to do with how popular she is / was at school. It really is deep on so many levels.

Apparently this is not a new phenomenon. In the 70’s the big wedding song of choice was ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol Harlem which talks about skipping the light fandango and other fruity things one does when one has a more than casual relationship with Charlie. Or cocaine as it’s sometimes called.

Not to be confused with ‘the’ Charlie, or soldier of the North Vietnamese Army who I had more than a casual relationship with back in ’69. He certainly wasn’t up for turning cartwheels across the floor or jizzing all over sixteen vessel virgins. Well maybe, who knows how Charlie unwound after a long day of being invisible. He was a man of mystery after all.

The writers of that particular song have long denied that it is actually about drug use but hey it was the sixties after all so who really knows aye? They sure wouldn’t. Sheeran on the other hand makes no such ingenuous claims; his song is what it is and he wrote it after doing a performance in a homeless shelter. What a guy.

I remember the very sexy Dido saying something similar about a song of hers at a concert me and the missus attended once. Hers was about locking herself and a drug addict mate in a room and going cold turkey till she was better. Naturally it was a huge wedding song at the time.

Incidentally my mate Marco bumped into Dido whilst in a cheese shop in London town one time. He reckons she was quite rude but that’s what you get for entering a cheese shop Marco, you tit. Might have been a fish shop actually, but that’s irrelevant.

So if your mate is about to pick The A Team as her song to walk down the aisle to, as she marries her favorite cat, then show her the vid on The YouChube. There are actually two clips, one of which is just Sheeran playing his guitar in the recording studio. You’ll know it because, well, he’s playing his guitar in the studio and he looks a lot like the ginga off Harry Potter. And it’s a bit gay. That’s not it. Pick the other one.

I’ve seen it a couple of times now and each time it reminds me of why I could never be a frequent flyer with working ladies because I am just too damn paternal. The one and only time I visited a strip club I spent the whole time wanting to take all the poor girls home and just give them a damn good cooked meal.

I don’t recall feeling that the time I saw a similar themed New Year’s show in The Hutt a few years earlier where a very talented young lady did remarkable things with a ping pong ball and a light stick. Not at the same time mind you because that really would be talent wouldn’t it? But then that was just tacky.

In the case of the girl featured in The A Team video I would run the poor girl a long hot bath, buy her some new stockings and let her have a good nights sleep, maybe even make her breakfast in bed the next day.

Oh sure, it won’t pay for her drug habit but at least she won’t need Ron Weasley to write a song about her for fucks sake.

Stuck in her daydream, been this way since 18...

They Cancelled New Years?!

Yep, the bastards cancelled New Years.

Here we are in Mt Maunganui aka The Mount, aka Mangas, for New Years and they cancelled the thing on account of it raining for a few days before hand. Eight hours to get here, only to find it gets called off for a bit of moisture. What a bunch of fucktards.

Not that a road trip up here should actually take that long mind you but I made the elementary error of not actually consulting a map in detail before hand, as every fella should do. Especially one who has had the exceptional military and martial art training I’ve had.

Oh sure, I had a fair idea where to go and got here we did, but I missed valuable time and fuel saving routes which, in the jungle, would get a man killed. There are no petrol stations in the jungle, only Charlie and he doesn’t take five cent discount vouchers.

Not all of the festivities were canned mind you, the fire works were still fired off which was great by all accounts, if you were directly underneath them. Not so if you were anywhere that required squinting and peering through the thick cloud because then you were right shit out of luck.

Still, I suppose when you’ve got a barge full of high explosives sitting out in a busy harbour you can’t really leave them floating about for too long, the last thing Tauranga wants right now is another maritime disaster on its shores. They say that there’s no such thing as bad press but having an inbound oil tanker collide with a shitload of fireworks you never let off because it was ‘a bit damp’ would well and truly test that theory, I reckon.

Did I mention that we can see the Rena from our corner of the beach? Not so close that we can see the dudes on board changing their minds, but close enough to sit there and think that, all environmental impacts aside, it would be kind of cool to see the thing crack in two whilst watching…

The sailors from the Rena are all around the place too. At least we think that’s who they are; there can’t be too many all male tour groups of Asian descent, dressed in several layers of thick clothing despite the mid twenty temperatures, that choose Tauranga as their Christmas destination of choice.

Despite the cancellations, which I’m pretty sure was just a few bands along the main drag that nobody would’ve actually turned up to see anyway, Mangas still went ‘off’. At least I think that’s what you could call a whole bunch of dudes in cars driving around the place revving and tooting and yelling out of the windows.

Remembering that this is midnight of course and there are numerous backyard fireworks displays happening at the same time and it all started to feel a little bit like downtown Baghdad on a good day. Only with Brotown accents.

However the most disturbing aspect of all this cancellation business was not that they flagged New Years, because lets be honest, I haven’t done that shit since that fateful night alone in a hotel room in ’99. No, it was that the Miss Mt Maunganui titty and thong fest, I mean beauty pageant, was cancelled.

What a disappointment for those girls that had lined up to be salivated over by the many men around here who would’ve lined up for the free perve aye? What are those girls going to do with their time now?

They’ll probably have to make do with a couple of married guys sitting on the beach pretending to look at the Rena, that’s what.

Mirror Earth, The Final Frontier.

Another edition to the wank bank this week for the space geeks amongst us, with the news that some big -fuck-off-shiny telescope has discovered a ‘mirror earth’ 600 light years away from us.

Firstly - what a waste of a telescope. Our gaff is located in a position where I can see into many windows of many houses and I could use just such a thing to indulge my voyeuristic tendencies that at this point in time, extend only to noticing that the teenage girl next door was taking pictures of herself in the bathroom the other night.

True story too, I could see the flash going off from our kitchen. Thankfully, even though the glass was frosted, I could tell she was clothed so I was not forced to trawl the internet to find the images which might have been upsetting to her parents. It would’ve been a tough job but hey, look after your neighbours and all that…

Secondly - naturally I’m skeptical because if it really is a mirror earth then there’s every chance there’s a mirror me on it living a life equally as unexciting as mine (as detailed above) and surely that can’t happen in the one reality, can it?

Apparently this mega scope has also spotted some 2000 new candidate planets which really does put our inconsequential existence into perspective doesn’t it? The sci-fi industry love this shit though because equally as many scripts of TVs / movies about life revolving around those planets are now being written as I type.

Oh and this mirror earth is closer to the sun than we are, so it’s warmer, for longer. Thus even its mirror Wellington is a better one because it does not blow like 50 Bastards, all of the time, nor is it constantly like Pearl Harbour outside (nasty nip in the air).

Ironically this week marks the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attacks which all sadness aside, are a reminder that modern armies just don’t do surprise attacks any more, not on that scale.

Today’s war zones are just one big game of who can hit who the hardest and no bugger surprises no bugger, just like Nam; Charlie and we spent all damn day and night looking for each other and the only real surprise was that occasionally, we bumped into one another.

Maybe we should’ve had a telescope.

If the Jungle's Rockin'...

Serenaded by a comrade playing guitar nearby, fighters for Libya's new transitional regime battled forces loyal to disposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi on Oct. 10 in Sirte

This photo reminds me of that time Almo played ’10 Guitars’ as we went full auto on Charlies arse down the Ho Chi Minh trail in ’68. Sadly it was the only song he knew and it got a bit repetitive after a dozen renditions. I remember him asking if we had any requests to which someone muttered “Anything but fucken 10 Guitars”.

And with that the bastard started playing it again…

Still, spooked the shit out of Victor Charles, especially once Almo got his Maori boy strumming going. That's what we always meant by 'If the jungle's rocking, don't come a knocking'.

Smooth Rolling Wayne Checks Out

Saxi Maxi rolled out of ClubDes this week, not because we told him his spokey dokeys were annoying but because he's on to bigger and better things.

It's not the first time some of us have waved goodbye to the big fulla, there was that one time in '67 as we Recon boys left for Vietnam (it's this whole other country) and he had to stay on account of articulated wheelchair tracks hadn't been invented then.

Fighting Charlie in the bush and paddy fields may not have called for a technical genius confined to a wheelchair but my life upon my return from the war zone as a psychopathic vigilante and all round nice guy - The Punisher - did, so it worked out fine.

I’ll think the thing I'll miss most about Maxi is those rides you used to give me around the place.

Funny how that brake lever of yours, the one that poked me in the back when I sat on your lap, never seemed to work no matter how hard I tugged at it. We just never seemed to slow down! You should get that looked out before you impale yourself.

Anyhoo, so long big boy. All the best in the new job, see you on Facey but not on a doggy date because you know how it is; love my dog, not yours. A dogging date on the other hand….

And yes, I know the locket I gave you is a bit sticky upon unwrapping it, but then it is filled with mans milk. Mine, obviously.

No, we can't go back to 'Nam now you've got your tank chair Maxi...

Three Long Years

I can't be a 100% sure but I think the missus is messing with me.

First we name the dog 'Charlie' and then she goes and buys Coke bottled for Vietnam from one of those one day sale sites!

And yes this photo is blurry, but trust me when I tell you the label says NUOC GIAI KHAT which, loosely translated from the Vietnamese, means YOU LOSE G.I.

Three long years, three consecutive tours and still on edge. Just saying.

Any Which Way But Libya

There's a lot of heavy shit going down in Libya, you may have noticed.

The natives are uprising against the oppressive ruler Muammar Gaddafi who has been King Dick round those parts since 1969, the very same year me and the Recon lads were finishing up in Vietnam. But more on that coinkidink a little further on.

Gaddafi always looks so comical to me, almost as if he’s not real. He swans around in his magnificent sarongs and uniforms like a raging poof and going from the images of the interior decorating he had going on his Palatial Palaces that the rebels have recently liberated I don’t think I’m far from wrong.

All genocide jokes aside though Gaddafi is a bad ass and not in the cool Samuel L Jackson sense of the term. Aside from all the death and suffering the guy has reigned over he’s a complete douche as best described by this passage from wankipedia:

By his own estimation, Gaddafi considers himself an intellectual and philosopher. He is known for a flamboyant dress sense, with a strong taste for safari suits and sunglasses. He changes his clothing several times each day, and according to his former nurses, "enjoys surrounding himself with beautiful things and people." He hired several nurses to care for his health, all of whom were beautiful young Ukrainian women.

Since the 1980s he has travelled with his Amazonian Guard, which is all-female, and reportedly is sworn to a life of celibacy (although Dr Seham Sergheva reported in 2011 that some of them were subjected to rape and sexual abuse by Gadaffi, his sons and senior officials).

In 2009, it was revealed that he does not travel without his trusted Ukrainian nurse Halyna Kolotnytska, noted as a "voluptuous blonde". Halyna's daughter denied the suggestion that the relationship is anything but professional. Gaddafi frequently made sexual advances on female journalists, and successfully bedded a few in exchange for interviews.

Gaddafi's former aides have said he is "obsessive" about his image. He gave gold watches with images of his face to his staff as gifts. In 2011, a Brazilian doctor told the Associated Press that he performed plastic surgery on Gaddafi in 1995 to avoid appearing old to the Libyan people.

So all power to the people I say, lets knock the bastard off. And I do love seeing the rebels on TV firing their various ordinances in the air in celebration. It does slightly amuse me though that they never once give thought to where that bullet or rocket propelled grenade is going to land but hey, what’s a couple of deaths by friendly fire when you’ve had over 30 years of brutal oppression aye?

I do have just the one criticism and as a former military man myself I feel qualified to make it of these guys:

Who despite risking their life for their country have no idea about functional footwear in the war zone; sandals on an anti aircraft gun goddammit? And Rambo in the front is sporting that bandolier of ammo in such a way that I just know he's going to fuck it up for everybody the moment he needs to drop some rock'n'roll on the Amazonian Guard. What a rookie.

These guys wouldn’t last two minutes in HotDamnVietnam. And how do they tell each other apart if they’re all wearing civvies? At least Charlie had the decency to wear black pajamas in 1969…

The only gay in the village...?

Perfectly Normal In My Opinion

From: DG Macca

Sent: Friday, 12 August 2011 12:41

To: Club Des

Subject: Perfectly normal in my opinion



http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/5434945/Man-sacked-for-washing-himself-with-own-urine



What's wrong with the world? Bloody reporters putting a spin on perfectly acceptable behavior.



From: ClubDes

Sent: Friday, 12 August 2011 12:43

To: DG Macca

Subject: RE: Perfectly normal in my opinion



Have they what. They should try three consecutive tours of Vietnam. We bathed in each others urine just to confuse the hell out of Charlie. Worked too, all that time and we never saw him once. Did offload an awful amount of ordinance in his general direction though…



From: DG Macca

Sent: Friday, 12 August 2011 12:37

To: ClubDes

Subject: Again…Perfectly normal.



http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/blogs/aunt-and-uncle-agony/5432754/Hubby-has-photos-of-another-naked-man



Is it normal for a man to have naked pictures of himself aroused on his cellphone and his laptop as well as a picture of another naked man??? I found a few of him in this state 4 years ago and he told me it was normal and I was being stupid even though I clearly told him I was really upset by it.



Now I have found a whole heap more, as well as a picture of this other naked man. Am I really just being a bitch or should I feel a bit off?



The dates of these have been taken at different times while I have been at work. The worse thing was I came upon the discovery this time as my 2 year old was playing with my husband's phone and the photos were found this way which made me look on the laptop.



I don't know what to do as he is going to throw it back on me and what if our kids wake up and find him like this while I am at work.



Regards

Confused



From: ClubDes

Sent: Friday, 12 August 2011 12:41

To: DG Macca

Cc: Almo

Subject: RE: Again…Perfectly normal.



Well if that makes a man abnormal then they better make room for you and I in the funny farm then cause we’ve got loads!



Of each other mostly but I kept the ones Almo sent me. I’m not usually into ‘small’ men but I could see he’d gone to a lot of trouble with the lighting and the courtesy trim. The nipple tassels looked new too.



From: Almo

Sent: Friday, 12 August 2011 13:24

To: ClubDes; DG Macca

Subject: RE: Again…Perfectly normal.



Honestly, I can’t believe they posted this article about my girlfriend and I. The only thing that makes me rest assured is that they’ve altered the story to make out that we’re married, so as to protect our identities…. apart from that I’m pretty pissed off.



On a side note, it’s not gay to put a wig on an aroused, naked man and pretend he’s a woman. How can that be gay? You’re pretending he’s a woman!



From: ClubDes

Sent: Friday, 12 August 2011 13:29

To: Almo, DG Macca

Subject: RE: Again…Perfectly normal.



Exactly. I did the same thing to DG Macca at your Mums place that time, spooned him whilst he slept and called him Susan.



So not gay.

The Road Trip

My sister and I are planning a road trip to see our Grandmother, god bless her.

Given that we haven’t had such a joint excursion since our adolescence it’s fair to say a few things have changed from when our only worry was who got the bigger slice of the backseat…

From: Trish
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:01
To: ClubDes
Subject: RE:

Will leave around 9 or 10 Saturday then Head home around 2 on Sunday depending on how things go. Did you want a ride?

From: ClubDes
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:11 a.m.
To: Trish
Subject: RE:

Possibly. First I require you to answer these suitability questions and take your time because my choosing you as a preferred transportation partner may depend on your answers:

1. What kind of car do you have?
2. Will there be smoking in said vehicle?
3. Will you be playing some indie music rubbish like Artic Monkeys the whole way?
4. What’s the rule on toilet stops i.e. none so bring an empty Coke bottle
5. Is the mooning of other cars / hitch hikers from the backseat permitted?
6. Can I drive?

From: Trish
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:26
To: ClubDes
Subject: RE:

1. We have a little Nissan hatch back you saw it when we where at granddads funeral.
2. I am happy to not smoke in the car for you however that will require 1 perhaps 2 smoke stops.
3. Mike is a music snob and so will be DJ for the trip he may if you’re nice let you give him suggestions on what he wants to play but he will override any unacceptable choices.
4. We can stop for the Loo when ever.
5. You can moon who you like as long as it’s not me.
6. No you can not drive.

From: ClubDes
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:36 a.m.
To: Trish
Subject: RE:

Interesting. Allow me to retort:

1. That sounds far too tight a fit for my liking. Where do you expect to sit all the female hitchhikers that I will demand you stop and pick up?
2. No toilet stops no smoko stops. See Q4.
3. Whatever. Make sure mike packs his headphones then cause I aint listening and besides, the driver dictates the music. See Q6.
4. This was rhetorical question. I’m bringing an empty coke bottle because that’s how I roll.
5. Hmm. What about other genitals? I do a fantastic ‘drowned rat’ up against glass. Not to mention ‘The Eiffel Tower’ and ‘The Lady’, always a crowd favourite.
6. Again, rhetorical.

From: Trish
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 11:41
To: ClubDes
Subject: RE:

Please bring a funnel to ensure no spillage into said coke bottle.

I am assuming you would like a ride and except my outlined conditions as below, you are welcome to run from the car if you can’t cope.

From: ClubDes
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 12:20
To: Trish
Subject: RE:

No funnel required. My aim is so true I can delabel said Coke bottle from the inside using the concentrated stream of mellow yellow only. It’s the heat you see, it melts the glue holding it on. Back in Nam we’d often use our canteens as hot water bottles after filling them this way. Of course we had to then drink it the next day so as to stop the sloshing which would give a brother away to the keen ears of Charlie…

What are the rules around flatulence? Windows up, or down?

From: Trish
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 12:42
To: ClubDes
Subject: RE:

No rules what ever happens, happens. I for one am planning on having curry on Friday night.

From: ClubDes
Sent: Thursday, 21 July 2011 12:44
To: Trish
Subject: RE:

Correct answer.

I’m in.