Sizzla fizzla

One in the eye for homophobic Ethiopian dictator worshippers when 4th rate skank(er) Sizzla was barred from spreading his shit in Paris, not long after being stopped at the border in Britain (for vileness, I hope).
It's one thing for slum dwellers to try to better their lives by using their talent to emerge from the primordial soup that is Kingston, Jamaica, but why on earth do they expect us faggots to pay for their passage if all that comes out of their mouths is only marginally different from what comes out of their arse?
And you have to wonder about their marketing skills because who on earth enjoys this kind of stuff apart from fellow would-be fag killers such as Christians and Moslems (and they hate reggae!). Rastas deserve better but are they now also part of the Coalition of the Circumcised [c]?
It's obvious smoking dope didn't liberate their minds, never mind their arses.

We'll have him, no worry, mate

The Australian rugby coach is reportedly dead set against the idea of Frederic Michalak coming down under to play for one of the Super 14 rugby teams. Doesn't he know he needs all the good-looking players he can get because some Aussie teams are particularly ugly?
There will always be a place for Frederic in the Waiheke Island rugby team, and he would be a dead cert for the Ponsonby Heroes.

Milan men's fashion

The BBC reports:

"The tattooed six-pack bloke is back in fashion, as designers apparently have decided to end a fling with femininity, fashion gurus say."

Surely said bloke has never been out of fashion! Not in my world at any rate.

Mainstream

How about pissing off some of the electorate just to please your core vote?
National Party leader Dr Brash said he didn't regard a variety of minority group members to be in the "mainstream". (Part of the radio interview transcription):

"Asked yesterday to spell out who was mainstream, Dr Brash said he would rather not go into too much definition, before referring broadly to unnamed minority groups the Government was pandering to."

i.e. brown people, people with kids, faggots, public servants etc. You have to wonder who is actually left to people the mainstream? And who would want to be? Nothing sounds worse to me than being considered mainstream, ordinary or just dull. It has always been a social and cultural death warrant.

The election campaign can be fun

Create your own billboard here.
Peter made a great one:

Operation Yellow Elephant

The ever wonderful Patriotboy is calling all bloggers to support Operation Yellow Elephant. The objective is to recruit College Republicans and Young Republicans to serve as infantry. They demanded this war and now viciously support it. It's only right that they also experience it.
An update of what is going down to reach the objective is here.

Which porn star am I?

Jacob Slader! You're a slim and tattooed total top, with sizable equipment you certainly know how to use. Aside from that, you've also got a brain! You are a teacher in your spare time, a Lord of the Rings geek, and you even speak Elvish! Who knew they built "nerds" this hot?

Which Gay Porn Star Are You?

And to think I still need to work up the courage to get my first tattoo and find the time to watch Lord of The Rings for the first time.
Oh, and in case you are curious, Jacob Slader has a blog. It's quite readable, funny even, but highly work unsafe! And if I had a body like that, I'd be a porn star too, or have that ambition. And get a few more tattoos.

Grumpy

The face of intolerant and abusive nun-killers. And will no-one rid me from this troublesome priest?

Why did the British & Irish Lions leave their best at home?

A picture of Ben Cohen worthy of your fridge door?

Jupiter and moon occultation

It was quite a sight. I just got off the ferry on Waiheke Island when the moon slid over Jupiter and made it invisible for over an hour. Called an occultation, it's apparently quite rare - every 50 years or so - so I was glad there were no clouds and so everyone could see it. No binoculars or telescope needed unless you wanted to see some of Jupiter's moons disappear one by one too. It was quite eerie to see the planet suddenly extinguished by the dark side of the moon.
Several commuters were gazing up, some keeping an eye on the moon while on the ferry (one advantage of being on the harbour in the pitch dark). One said, in response to an ignorant comment that Jupiter would go in front of the moon, we'd be in big trouble if that happened!

What rating does your life deserve?

Probably because I don't do P, prefer Belgian beer and Waiheke wine

my life has been rated:
See what your rating is!
Created by bart666

Meme

These blog memes are starting to look like a modern version of a chain letter. Mr Berlin Bear sent me one and who am I to refuse? I have said no to bears in my sordid past and here's my chance to make amends. So here goes:

Name 5 things you miss about your childhood.

- The smell of the North Sea during holidays in Wenduine. A week's stay in a lovely old informal hotel on the sea front with mum and gran, which for most of my childhood was my only annual holiday away from home. A week of sand castle building, rollerskating, go-karting, paper flower selling, shell collecting, swimming, dune climbing, tram riding (the tram stop was underneath our hotel window and I was obsessed with the tram time table) and Bruges-visiting
- Related to the previous item: the sight of men in bright white overalls (with a green BP logo on their backs) setting up and organising motorised go-karting races just off the beach. I never took part but always watched and it never failed to impress me. Undoubtedly the reason why I still like uniforms.
- Christmas and winter at home. We had a fake silver tree loaded with sparkly balls and ribbons (no minimalism there!). Home heating was provided by a massive coal range which went for about 6 months of the year. Dad used it in his bread baking efforts. I loved it when it snowed and the railway embankment opposite our flat was covered in white, with the promise of sledging down it in the morning.

- The Eurovision Song Contest. I watched religiously from the mid 1960s. (Have I told you I was an early starter?) I distinctly remember watching Sandie Shaw win barefoot and Cliff Richard being beaten by a Spanish diva. When ABBA won I lost interest because it couldn't get any better than that. I avidly collected the score sheets and kept my own versions on the night. It usually was the biggest night of the year for me.
- Going to the pictures, which included a shortfilm, news, publicity and an icecream break. There were over a dozen cinemas in Antwerp at the time and they all displayed stills from their current features next to the box office. I never understood why anyone wanted to go watch films whose black & white stills showed reclining females dressed in little else but black panties and bras. It was only much later I realised the stills poorly represented the actual R18 films. But it sure looked arty.

Sent the meme on to:
- Paul at Buggery.org
- Peter at DubDotDash
- Joe at JoeMyGod
- Jock at JockoHomo
- Doge at Yadoge

This meme has a rule to link to previous entries:
Chaos Theory
Wired JAFA
Bad Aunt
BerlinBear
Uroskin
Add your own blog link at the end and delete the first link, if you be so kind as to pass on the meme.

Nah, watching TV doesn't rot my brain

Certainly not when UKTV is screening Green Wing. Oh, while we're at it: "S**t, or get off the pot" and other wonderful droll moments on The Smoking Room.
UPDATE: the Green Wing only screens on the Australian feed of UKTV, argghhhh.

Too much TV watching rots my brain?

It was a weekend for a non-stop Are You Being Served marathon. Sure it was inane (innocent even) but double entendres from the 70s and 80s still managed to elicit a snigger from me - and to think it probably would still not be screened uncut in the USA! You couldn't but laugh after many, many hours of stuff like "my pussy was so cold I had to stroke it all night" and "my pussy wins prizes every time I exhibit it". The supposedly gay character portrayal still induces cringeing. When the series was first screened I couldn't identify with being gay at all due to Mr Humphries. If that was gay then I was emphatically not!
Last night saw the PopeTown series kick-off after some wild claims of "offensiveness" and "cancelled by the BBC" by C4 TV and their PR agency at the Catholic Church. But going by episode one, it's all a bit of a do. It even got a [PGR] rating since there was no offensive language, nudity or anything else adult that could mildly interest you in watching TV in the first place. Father Ted, in comparison, was a far better tilt at poking fun. And it was ruder. Only Ruby Wax as the pope's voice was ok-ish.
In other rude comedy news: some amusing new flag suggestions for the UK from Little Britain here. If only the NZ flag debate was so amusing.

If only the Lions rugby tour was as exciting

Jonah Lomu couldn't believe his luck by not having to play in the All Blacks-Lions series because he could behold a most magnificent performance, much better than any soccer or rugby match, of strip-jack poker by Rio Ferdinand and drinking buddies. This is how the Herald report had it:

"What happens when one of the globe’s top rugby stars meets one of its top soccer stars? In the case of Jonah Lomu and Rio Ferdinand, it’s all eyes averted... Lomu, in the UK last week for his return match to competitive rugby, was strolling through one of the bars in the $1500-a-night London hotel, The Grove, when he was exposed to more than he bargained for - England and Manchester United soccer defender Ferdinand in the buff. "He was completely naked. I didn’t know what to think," Lomu said. "Rio and his buddies were drinking and playing strip-jack naked. It was some sight." Lomu said Ferdinand was too caught up drinking champagne, beer, wine "and having a good time" to notice him so he just kept walking. "I tried to keep my head down, but you couldn’t miss them. Rio was starkers. He had absolutely nothing on."

The Lions look rather ho-hum in comparison, really.

The wowsers are alive and well in New Zealand

If you thought New Zealand was a rational, secular and liberal minded country, think about one thing: alcohol.
Incredibly, you need to be 18 to have a beer with your mates, which is several years older than the right to:
- drive (sober, and licenced, naturally)
- have sex with all genders (but not watch it on video or have a cigarette after)
- join the workforce and pay tax
- join the army and die for your country
More liberties at age 18 here.
And now the latter day wowsers, under the guise of "The Progressive Party", have a introduced a Bill into parliament to raise the drinking age to 20. This is such utter bollocks and the "reasons" given for the change are all listed as 'consequences' of the earlier lowering of the drinking age to 18. Conveniently there is no forum there to register your protest. Ironically, the same MP who introduced the R18 Beer Bill is now sponsoring the reversal to R20. And then they blame us for not taking those politicians seriously.
Any change in the human right to have a beer after work for 18 and 19 year olds should only be sanctioned by a referendum of said age group because they are the only ones affected by this law change.
My advice would be to swap the drinking age and the driving age so they learn to hold their ale before they get to hold the wheel. But fat chance that such a rational, liberal and secular proposal would ever get through here.

The house that I would love to live in

If you have ever been to Scotland, you really cannot have missed Charles Rennie Mackintosh's architecture, tea rooms and other art nouveau design in Glasgow and other places. It's really my favourite sort of design environment I would happily live in for all time because it looks timeless and modern at the same time. (Of course it is quite period and date related, but who cares, I love Roman villas too). Now you can soon visit his sites aided by PDAs to explain his art and architecture. And when in Glasgow, never miss having tea at the Willow Tea Rooms, or you haven't lived.

I can't wait for the next Belgium V Holland soccer match

A diplomatic incident between Belgium and The Netherlands over the weekend after an interview with Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht in which he described the Dutch PM Jan-Peter Balkenende as "a mixture between Harry Potter and a nice petit bourgeois". All in aid of a spat over the EU Treaty referendum, which De Gucht claims would have been passed in a Belgian referendum.

The Harry Potter comparison is an old one. Balkenende used it himself in his 2002 election campaign and was reported as such by the BBC, so it's a bit of a beat up. I'm sure you could come up with far more unflattering ones, even for the Belgian PM.

Stagecoach bus strike compensation

I sent the following to Fullers Ferries (owned by Stagecoach):

I have applied for a refund covering the monthly pass time period affected by the Stagecoach strikes in May. Stagecoach advised to contact Fullers for any refunds/discounts on monthly Waiheke Fullers/Stagecoach passes. Please send the $45 cheque my address.

Then I got this reply:

I understand that you are applying for a refund relating to the disruption caused by the recent strike by Stagecoach drivers. The refund as advertised by Stagecoach is only applicable to customers who hold a Stagecoach All Zone card, as these customers have specifically paid for travel on the buses as well as on our ferries.
As a holder of a Waiheke monthly pass, the cost of the pass purely relates to the ferry service. The entitlement to free bus travel on both Waiheke Island and on Stagecoach buses in central Auckland is provided as an additional benefit by Fullers at no cost to our customers. As such, the cost of the Waiheke monthly pass is exactly the same irrespective of whether or not you choose to use any of the aforementioned bus services.
As a consequence of this, I am afraid that Fullers are not able to provide any form of refund for services lost due to the bus strike, as no monies have changed hands in terms of provision of this service.
We are sorry that we are not able to help you further with this, but I'm sure that you can appreciate that we are not in a position to refund something for which we have not take payment.
Yours sincerely,
Lynda Heard, Office Administrator, Fullers Group Limited

All good and well, but the fearful question now is: how long will it be before Fullers withdraws that "benefit" and in effect will increase its monthly pass price by offloading any bus travel costs on the pass holder?

Bless those Swiss

Referendums occasionally do the decent thing and their outcomes don't always cater for the basest in human nature. Slavery and the death penalty would never have been abolished by plebiscites: it took the Enlightenment and the occasional civil war to do that, and is an ongoing process not yet completed in some countries.
But now the Swiss, after being the last in Europe to grant women full political rights due to male referendum voters, have said yes to abolishing some social and fiscal discrimination against same sex couples. Another blow to reactionary Europe, and I do hope it covers the Swiss Guards in the Vatican.

Another puzzle

Remember all that coverage of the French EU Constitutional Treaty referendum and how the French "overwhelmingly" rejected the Treaty with a 55-45 percent split. Many TV reports and commentator adverbs and adjectives described the rejection as an apocalyptic opposition by angry voters.
But compare that to the referendum in Switzerland adopting the Schengen and Dublin Accords by a similar 55-45 percent split in favour but described the win invariably as "narrow".

NZ elections

The election campaign is expectedly fierce this year and the new culture jamming pastime of defacing billboards is already in full swing around the New Zealand blogosphere.
My favourite (again from About Town) so far is:

More things that puzzle my Asperger's mind

If being gay in the army is not allowed, and you sign up as a gay man; and you get wounded in battle and you get a purple heart for your trouble; and after you get shipped out to convalesce, you decide to come out and you want to return to your unit for some more; and the army says no because you can't tell; why sign up in the first place? Why would you want to defend such a system, or even want to die for it?
Not all queens have brains, it seems.

Our favourite pastime: fisking Garth "Vader" George

Good ole George is back from his Anzac trip to his heroes' fields in yonder Turkey and it was a pity he didn't take the opportunity to have a look around the bits of Europe he is scathing about in his latest column.

Except for Newstalk ZB's morning host, Leighton Smith, I have never heard anyone predict the eventual disintegration of the European Union, and sooner rather than later.

That's because Leighton Smith talks about everything out of his arse, as is his wont as a talkback radio host, we don't expect anything else. I've never heard much talk about the eventual disintegration of the United States either, blue and red states notwithstanding, but that doesn't mean it's about to happen, no matter how welcome that would be.

Yet for years I have held the opinion that this unwieldy collection of different nations cannot survive as an entity and that the more additional economic, social and political connections that are made, the less likely it is to survive.

Garth, the sociologist and politocologist, swimming against the tide of social progress, peace, tolerance and just plain common sense, obviously prefers the pre-war arrangement, in vogue since the Celts were defeated by the Romans, with occasional bloody wars alternating with tense ceasefires, Inquisitorial screams and the sweet smell of heretical burnings.

The resounding "non" in the referendum on the proposed EU constitution held in France this week is merely the first major breeze through the house-of-cards structure that is European "unity". And at the time of writing it is expected that the Dutch, fiercely protective of the sovereignty of their damp little patch of dirt, will follow suit. That the breach happened in France comes as no surprise, for the French are probably the most nationalistic, insular and xenophobic of all Europeans.

So hurray for the Dutch protecting their polder but boo to the French for wanting to give Chirac a bloody nose.

The court action to suppress courtroom videotapes by the undercover Rainbow Warrior killers, Mafart and Prieur, is simply further evidence - although none is needed - of the selfishness and arrogance of this insufferable race.

Garth couldn't afford the French champagne to celebrate the attack on those horrible, pagan, nay, even godless, green activists? Or was he just not invited to the party?

It would have been interesting if Germany had held a referendum instead of deciding the constitution issue in the Bundestag. But Gerhard Schroeder wasn't as silly as the doddering Jacques Chirac. He probably knew that a referendum would be doomed to failure in a country in which neo-Nazism flourishes mainly as a result of European Union racial liberalism.

Ah, the war and the Nazis, never ending sources for the self-identification of Garth's generation. Everything is frozen since 8 May 1945, Germany isn't really not one of us, there are still all those Nazis under the bed, no wonder referendums are frowned upon - never mind that the Allied designed constitution does not make room for plebiscites, not since the rather unfortunate experience before the war with them (just Google plebiscites, Anschluss, Sudetenland).

And I wonder, too, what the results might have been had Austria and Italy asked their populations to decide. Greece, too, with Turkey knocking on the EU's door. In Britain, which to its credit has remained more at arm's length from the EU than most, Tony Blair seems sure to think twice about the referendum planned for next year because there is nothing surer than that the Brits would deliver an even stronger "no" than the French.

Never you mind that Britain has been the most ardent proponent of EU enlargement - in a thinly veiled bid to dilute a Franco-German axis of power in the EU - and is campaigning for Turkey's entry too.

How anyone can believe that this assortment of nations can form such an intimate relationship and make it last is beyond me, although I'm sure it makes perfect sense to the post-modernist utopianists who devised it and built it. They seem to think that history can be ignored, that nationhood, race, ethnicity and culture developed and nurtured over thousands of years can suddenly be subsumed to a perceived "good".

I often ask myself the same question about the United States, Brazil, India, Russia and China.

They seem to think that in this New Age of political correctness, ancient rivalries - often virulent hatreds - can be overcome and forgotten as if they had never happened. The whole of European history says bollocks to that. But, once again, the post-modernists hold sway, the multiculturalists who believe that all cultures are equivalent and thus can live together in harmony. World history says bollocks to that, too.

The history and unrivalled success of the EU has been about saying bollocks to those irrational "hatreds", which were mostly fostered by religious fanatics such as the Catholic Church, their protestant counterparts and now their Islamist partners in crime. A "Coalition of the Circumcised" (c)Uroskin arraigned against the secular Enlightenment project that the EU is.
Not content with just being a religious nationalist, he swallows whole the pseudo-anti-capitalist line that it's all about the money:

Why have these things been done - the attempts to make Western Europe's disparate nations into one amorphous country, and the attempts to integrate disparate races into one New Zealand? It's all been done in the pursuit of money.

But then, it's not about the money. No, the superannuated mind twists and turns in its swamp of illogicality (will he ever be able to make his mind up about anything?):

Thus are we reduced by the neo-Marxists to the economic units proclaimed by Karl Marx himself. He must be laughing his head off in whatever hell he inhabits to see that what his original philosophies miserably failed to achieve are being pursued afresh by a new breed.

And then Garth fires his moneyshot:

And I'll tell you what: The European Union will disintegrate just as the Soviet Union did. Why? Because the foundations upon which they both were and are built are Godless.

Well, I'd rather be godless than clueless.

National Party launches election billboards

Their rather unwitty collection can been here.
So then we have the shorter National Party platform:
- Maori are not New Zealanders
- You, bastards, you don't need no educashiun
- You, sick people, pay or die
- John Banks for police minister again
- bring back the noose/cane/stocks
- You, poor people, here's some rope
- Cut, at the bone/jugular/kneecap/neck
- You, brown people, piss off
- God (and the National Party) will save but you will pay instead.

If you feel like it, you can suggest "culture jamming" billboard slogans to No Right Turn.

While we're on the subject

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements. Materialist 88% Existentialist 81% Modernist 75% Postmodernist 69% Cultural Creative 44% Fundamentalist 31% Romanticist 31% Idealist 25% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

That's why I have never been able to analyse drag queens, "Big Brother" and "Angels in America".

Another one

I swear I have never watched a Star Wars film (at least not on the big screen, watching it on a 12" Trinitron is nothing like watching it for real). And I have no idea who Liam Neeson's character is. And I don't care. (I'd only be interested if he was allowed to screw/blow/dine Ewan McGregor) But the characteristics listed are vaguely adequate.

Who invents this bollocks?

Robot You are 100% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 0% Brutal, and 28% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. To put it less negatively: 1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive. 2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted. 3. You are more GENTLE than brutal. 4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant. Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on Ok Cupid