The perils of flight

In good Ole New Zealand most airlines are now banning men to sit next to unaccompanied children on their planes. What do they think those men will get up to on a full plane? Groom them as their internet counterparts? Which wouldn't be a bad idea since there is another nits epidemic going round and their parents obviously don't care.
Personally I'm delighted not to have to sit next to a horrible, smelly, rowdy, hyperactive brat, so only for that reason I welcome the airline policy. Children should be seated as far away from adults as possible. Preferably gagged and/or drugged for the duration of the flight.

Gay-free at last

The Catholic Church finally pushed out the boat and declared you need to be gay-free for at least three years before you can be considered for ordination. Apart from this being a really stupid PR exercise that will put the kybosh on any recruitment of new priests - the church has always been a haven for the employment of gay men through the ages, and the employment of gay artists for the beautification of the Vatican ('Ello Michelangelo) - it also makes a terrible and unforgivable mistake of muddling up the paedophile scandal with the sexual orientation of your employees. Banning gay men from becoming priests will do nothing against paedophiles continuing their trade. But then churchmen always muddle up sex issues since they're supposed to know nothing about a sex life.
I was taught at undergraduate school by a bunch of Jesuit priests - the best teachers I have ever had, I must say - who quite openly lived with their girlfriends. I simply don't understand why you would want to turn away talent like that for the trivial reason of wanting a sex life.

A few odd things I noticed about this blog (and the people who land here):

- The largest number of visitors (16%) come here via QueerClick (not worksafe). I think a lot of those visitors must be rather disappointed I do not provide the entertainment of the meaty kind they are obviously looking for.
- Daniel Carter, and his girlfriend(?) and his Jockey underpants are a never ending source of fascination in the search terms. Get over it. Buy Sloggi, or better, go commando like a real man.
- It seems you still can't get enough of Alex Behan and his penis. Heaven knows why this has been a search item for nigh on 18 months now.
- My post on Nana Mouskouri's voting record on gay issues as a Member of the European Parliament is now an external link on her entry at Wikipedia. 48 people clicked through from there - shouldn't I marvel at the amount of people interested in her?

Something for the weekend, Sir?

A queer art history anthology: marvellous homo-art dating back 2,500 years, loads of beautiful paintings, sculpture, photographs and drawings.
I didn't spot my favourite male sculpture so here it is:

Oh, and before you ask, it's called "The Dying Gaul".

When one-handed inspiration runs out

The perfect Christmas present for your favourite onanist in the family.

Calendars

It's that time of year when they flog calendars at you so we'll take a look at what is on offer. It's all very arty, black & white, oiled, scrubbed and photoshopped, but hey, it'll look good on your wall and even your mum will get a slight thrill.
It's all far too clean-cut for my liking, because I prefer my men sweaty, muddy and steaming on a cold, sleety morning at Murrayfield. (inspired by Gazza)
1. The French rugby team.
2. The Italian firemen rugby team: profits shared with the Hurricane Katrina fund.
3. The Welsh gay rugby team.
4. English Collegiate rugby team.
5. Desktop calendars with various gay sports themes.
6. Late entry: rugbyguys.com

Pot to Kettle: still black!

Revisiting an older post on Cults.co.nz, I was disappointed they have not been updating their lists. Destiny Church and Party were soundly trounced at this year's polls but not a pipsqueak about that (yet). Homosexuality still hasn't made it into the list, but some updates involving largely "new age" nonsense have been made.
The one thing that did strike me was that Phil Goff, who used to be our Foreign Minister, is listed as "dangerous", while a convicted criminal - for indecent assault, no less - Neville Cooper did not get that epithet. It seems in Jesusland if you deny the charges that a secular state lays on you, all is OK and you will be forgiven.
I know whom I would warn my children about!

Reading further through the list it strikes me that the editors, who are, of course, Christians and wouldn't dream of labeling their own belief system as a cult, reserve their fiercest anti-stance not against simple atheists (also labeled as a religion!) as you would expect, but against fellow believers much closer to themselves - see the diagram in a previous post - such as Scientology, Islam, Judaism and an assortment of Christian fundamentalists, described in poisonous terms not heard since the great schisms in Marxism during its Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist/Trotskyist period and the western Christian church during the Reformation.
Which makes it all just an update on the age-old debate about how many angels can sit on my prick. (Plenty!)

Britain joins civilisation

British pubs and clubs will be able from today to get 24 hour licences to stay open and serve the thirsty public.
About time.
Apart from the restrictions on the hours you can go for a drink in Britain - in Belgium it has long been normal for pubs to be open in the morning and they hardly ever shut until the last punter has gone - I find it odd there is a need to have a licence to sell alcohol. One doesn't need a licence to sell packets of cigarettes and that drug is far deadlier than your average pint of your favourite tipple, so why the double standards?

Another few hundred metres out of 65 kilometres

From my friend Jaak, another Belgian expatriate but living in La Douce France, the news that another coastal town in Belgium will be reserving a stretch of its valuable beach for textile-free recreation:

Tweede naaktstrand aan de kust
De kans is groot dat tegen volgend zomerseizoen een tweede naaktstrand wordt aangelegd aan de kust. Het naaktstrand van Bredene heeft de Middelkerkse VLD geïnspireerd om met eenzelfde trekpleister uit te pakken. Volgens burgemeester Michel Landuyt (VLD) is al een plaats gereserveerd waar het kan worden aangelegd: tussen Lombardsijde en Westende-Bad, in een redelijk geïsoleerde zone waar vroeger camping Cosmos gevestigd was. (Gazet van Antwerpen)

Bredene has the original Belgian nude beach, although you could always go au naturel just across the border in Zeeland, where Cadzand's beach has always welcomed the more liberated minds and bodies.

Sex in the news

News item:

Teen charged with having sex with dummy

SIOUX FALLS, S.D., Nov. 21 (UPI) -- A South Dakota teenager has been charged with indecent exposure for allegedly having sex with a mannequin.
A security guard found Michael James Plentyhorse, 18, sans pants on the floor in the Washington High School Alumni Room in Sioux Falls, S.D., with a half-naked female mannequin, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported.
"There was inappropriate activity between him and the mannequin," a police spokesman told the newspaper. "That's the only way I know how to put it."
The spokesman said security staff had reported the same mannequin found undressed on several occasions.

I love the use of the French phrase 'sans pants' to describe his sexual technique. If the reporter had been really historically aware he could have written 'sans-culottes'. But the horny guy really impressed me by shucking his slacks completely because usually, for a quickie, boys unbutton and only slightly lower their pants so their arses remain unexposed. The security guard could have noted further details such as whether his ass was hairy or smooth, what stage their love making had progressed to and whether he made sure he was having safe sex - such as making sure none of his more sensitive bits were in danger of getting caught in any mannequin mechanics. But in fact the guard was speechless as he didn't know "how to put it", so the sight must have been impressive.

News item via World O'Crap

Four sports channels and is there anything worth watching?

I often ask myself when forking out huge amounts of money to subscribe to a few sports channels, do I really watch any of it and why is there so little on that holds my interest? Most schedules seem to concentate on group sports with either an oval or a round ball, which is really of marginal interest unless they zoom in on some interesting balletic activity. Which is rare and doesn't really warrant staying up till 3am to watch a rugby game live.
No, what I want from a sports channel is: gymnastics, diving, wrestling and swimming. Six months after the 2005 champs in France took place, a three hour package finally appeared on my screen. Igor Cassina (pictured) won the horizontal bar event (and my personal olive crown), and plenty of other eye candy paraded, jumped, spun, swung, sommersaulted, pirouetted and cartwheeled for my Saturday morning delectation.

As an afterthought, I wrote to Sky Television to ask why they thought it was suitable to screen a gymnastics championship 6 months after it was actually held. I mean, I don't mind the actual screening of gymnastics championships, there are far too few of them anyway, but why the time lag? Imagine the outcry if they decided to screen an All Blacks test match 6 months later only.
This what I got back from them:

"As gymnastics is a niche sport, we only bid for delayed rights, and we prefer to retain the coverage to play later in the year when the schedule is leaner, and there are not so many Rugby or Rugby League matches to work around. If we were to play this programming closer to the actual competition, it is likely that it would air in a poor timeslot, as it would be competing with a lot of live sport that we have at that time of the year."

No degree of separation

What do Frank Gallagher from "Shameless", the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, King Lear and Smike have in common?
They're all played by David Threlfall.

I never thought I would score anything different

You fit in with: Atheism Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Atheist. You have very little faith and you are very focused on intellectual endeavors. You value objective proof over intuition or subjective thoughts. You enjoy talking about ideas and tend to have a lot of in depth conversations with people. 50% scientific. 60% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Sunday distraction

What I really did on Sunday was ignore all the garden safari business around me in order to concentrate on the real issues of the day: Ben Cohen's haircut and body during the England-Australia rugby match.
He just looked magnificent and scoring the first try of the series undoubtedly earned him full attention by his teammates in the shower afterwards, or so I would like to think they rewarded him.
BTW the waterslide picture is on my work desktop to alert my co-workers god does exist!

Smart Aleck Alert

The BBC has all sorts of high school tests here, scroll down to the weekly curriculum test. I got 9/12 for French, 19/20 for English, 11/12 for history, 11/14 for geography, 6/10 for physics, 15/20 for maths and a terrible 4/12 for Dickens and biology. No wonder I never made it as a gardener (or historical novel writer)

My homework

Since my friend Chuck missed last night's episode of Desperate Housewives, he can catch up here with Jesse Metcalfe's jogging physique.

The Garden Safari

A very pleasant, if hectic, weekend with several hundred people visiting our garden (and 17 others), all for a good cause.
Ewen got all the planting done and I was in charge of weed pulling for the last couple of weeks, but the garden looked presentable and everybody was quite complimentary.
Of course, we could not compete with the clifftop estates and their million dollar ocean views, but it was nice to hear that visitors appreciated coming to a "real Waiheke" garden.
In all, about $20,000 was raised for the Jassy Dean Trust, which is a massive success.
The star of the show in our garden, the one plant everybody was interested in, was the Mexican Blood flower (pictured), a vine that grows along the length of our deck rail. It flowers deep red and does so for most of the summer.

NZ politics

Nandor Tanczos is going to be my MP after all as he will be taking up Rod Donald's seat in Parliament. So that means all three main candidates in my electorate (Judith Tizard, Pansy Wong, and Nandor) are MPs.
It makes you wonder why they have local contests at all, but I have long advocated a list system only for electing parliament and do away with electorate seats (and, as a bonus, no need for Maori seats either as they will be able to attract votes from the whole country rather than only from those who identify as Maori).
For Nandor Tanczos it has been a rollercoaster ride: the Green Party was short of 1,250 votes to get him back in, but now after Rod Donald's tragic death, he can pick up where he left off. And he would make a good Attorney General too!

The Jassy Dean Trust Garden Safari

If you're looking for something to do this sunny (but it may become cloudy with some showers) weekend and you want to perve at how the rich and not-so-rich live on our island, why don't you come over and do the Garden Safari?
It's an annual charity event by the Jassy Dean Trust, and 18 gardens, many of which have original garden art in them too, can be visited.
Check the Garden Safari website for details. Our garden is in it too!

Speech from the Throne

Nice pomp and circumstance, in a cringy colonial sort of way, I mean, state opening of the New Zealand parliament complete with Black Rod and bewigged judges. Governor-General, now there's a dream job. You wear a hat with chook feathers and inspect the guard of honour formed by the finest specimen sailors in our Navy. Something I could get used to every day.
The new Government spelled out its policies for the coming term. As expected, lots of spending on families with children, students with loans and infrastructure projects. No tax cuts expected, rather the opposite in the guise of higher interest and mortgage rates. But what I'm disappointed about is there is no mention of a fourth week of pain annual leave, promised to us by Ms Clark if we voted her back in:

Prime Minister Helen Clark spoke to the CTU conference [Keynote Address to Council Of Trade Unions' Biennial Conference at Michael Fowler Centre Wellington Thursday, 23 October 2003] and gave her strongest signal yet that workers might indeed get an extra week’s annual holiday — but not until after the 2005 elections. She told the CTU that it was never Labour’s policy to introduce the fourth week in the present term of government "... because we have given higher priority to other initiatives benefiting workers and their families."

From: The Jobs Letter

In space, no-one can smell you

I tuned in accidentally to Star Trek: Enterprise, the pheromone episode. Alien "slave girls" only have to waft their sex hormones over any species to turn them into gibbering, drooling, sweaty and aggressive slaves. That's the premise of this rather ludicrous story line. Said slave girls were looking suspiciously like a caveman's wet dream, apart from their sickly green skin tones, but the thing that got me was that for that pheromones-conquer-everything story line to work, they could have looked like any pig in space and still got their men. If the male of any species just get led by the nose, he'll want to nail anything. Sounds like the real world to me!
Star Trek has always been big on silly plot lines and unlikely couplings, but why have the writers and producers never got out of their 1950s mindset when it comes to sex and sexual relations in space? It would be far more interesting, intriguing and watchable if they were to speculate and explore how different - or at least contemporary rather than 1950s midwest USA - sex would be in the 25th Century. And I would screw the 3 of 5 Borg (pictured) any day.

The 2005 Durex Global Sex Survey

It's that time of year again where the condom maker released the answers [PDF] to questions they asked world citizens about their sexual habits. We discussed it last year so we can make some comparisons:

- In the number of sexual partners category New Zealanders have increased from 11.9 to 13.2 (somebody most have found a new girlfriend who finally put out) - still pathetically low and most probably pulled upwards by all those gay men with insatiable appetites (we know who you are!)
- Greeks (at 55%) do the most anal sex - unsurprising, since they have invented it.
- Three quarters of Hong Kongers do tantric sex, compared to 2% of Indians, which is surprising since the Indians have invented that one.
- New Zealand, Iceland and South Africa have the most three-in-a-bed romps after Australia.
- Australia is the sodomy capital (a whopping 22%), with NZ, the US, Ireland and South Africa close behind on 20% - who said we were only 1 in 10? 1 in 5 more likely!
- China is the SM capital - must be all that Chinese water torture and foot binding.
- Britons love their toys and dressing up for sex most - considering the number of sexual subcultures that are flourishing in the UK, I'm not surprised.
Oh, and Daniel Carter is again New Zealand's sexiest male - no complaints from me there - and Waiheke Island is rated second sexiest place in New Zealand: I'll keep the bed warm for you if you want to come find out why.

North Shore Busway includes free parking

Last Sunday the new busway opened from the North Shore to Auckland City. Included are 700 FREE car parks for public transport commuters. No doubt the car parks are surrounded by hi-tech surveillance so any theft or damage to cars will be recorded and, hopefully, prevented. It's the only way people will leave their cars all day parked, secure in the knowledge they will be able to use them at the end of the day. This principle of secure parking is also prevalent in all car parking in town, even if you have to pay for it.
Compare this to the situation at Matiatia: what do you actually get for your $6 a day? Will the Council, as landlord, be held responsible for any damage to, petrol siphoning from or theft of your car? If not, why not? Does the $6 not go to insurance against damage claims? Why are North Shore commuters more deserving than Waiheke ones in this respect? Is it because they have us by the short-and-curlies by forcing us to park there as we have no alternative in driving into town like the Shorians have?

My issue isn't so much with parking that has to be paid for by the users or by the whole community (in case free parking is offered) but one of fairness:
1. The half of the Matiatia car park, which used to be free, has always been in Council ownership. So the new charges are actually used to finance the purchase of a block of land that is only partly used (and was already charged for) as carparking.
2. The reason why free parking is offered on the mainland is because people will add the price of parking there to actually driving to town and not having the bother of worrying about safety or bus and train timetables. Since islanders are a captive audience, and perceived as rich, they are expected to pay whatever monopoly price is charged by either the council for parking, Fullers for the ferry service and the ARC for usage of the wharves.

I'm all for bribing people out of their cars and into public transport by subsidies and freebies, to lessen the road congestion. But they should be evenly and equitably spread out.
At the moment Auckland expects Waiheke Islanders to pay for everything: no subsidies for our ferry service; market price for ferry car parking; a wharf tax that covers the cost of maintaining the whole wharf system on the Waitemata and payment of ARC rates that subsidises Auckland public transport we have only marginal access to (BTW why is it that a Link bus trip costs one third of the fare charged by the Waiheke Bus Company for the same distance travelled?).
So, in all, I think you mainlanders get a great deal out of us, so please give us a break.
Here's a deal: we let you pay the wharf charges in return for the island free ownership of the Matiatia land. A win-win situation for everybody!

Which Reservoir Dog are you?

Which Reservoir Dog Are You? brought to you by Quizilla

Latent is not a word in my world.
Loved the movie, by the way, and Tim Roth is on my To Do list.

NZ politics

The Maxim Institute is not just a collective of All In The Family types who know how to copy and paste, they occasionally come up with some useful tools if you like your politics in a traditional black-or-white kind of way (akin to the "You're either with us or agin us" Bush mode). They offer a handy page where you can check you own morals against the political voting patterns in conscience issues in the last parliamentary term.
My result just reinforced the correctness of my vote: most Green MPs voted as I would have done. ACT and Labour members also agreed with me in large measure. And the usual suspects from National, NZF and United Future are really beyond the pale in my moral framework.

Paris is Burning

Social studies and citizenship classes for young people never have quite the impact of being at the receiving end of a police baton during a street riot to emphasise your alienation and inferior class status and to induct you into the power structures that are challenged at your peril.
Parisian suburbs of the non-chi chi arrondissement kind have been in flames for the last week, as a sort of latter day Fronde by a new Paris mob. The CRS, of course, relished the opportunity to actually do the things every police recruit signs up for: meting out street justice and using the strong arm of the law to show who's boss. The mob, naturally enough, never shows the other cheek, resulting in fiery cat and mouse games worthy of Guy Fawke's Day celebrations. If a rival gang or drug trader intrudes on your patch, it's only natural (and it makes business sense) to protect it.
Then comes along an American professor, who thought that history had come to an end (yeah right!) and probably has trouble locating Paris on a world map, but that doesn't deter him from pontificating on the situation in Europe:

"New policies to reduce the separateness of the Muslim community [...] have been put in place in the Netherlands. [...] But the much more difficult problem remains of fashioning a national identity that will connect citizens of all religions and ethnicities in a common democratic culture, as the American creed has served to unite new immigrants to the United States."

You don't really know whether this kind of praise for his own society is just plain ignorance or ideologically driven, but if I were him I would be more careful in describing the United States as a haven for immigrants (or any other struggling and poor people). American immigrants and minorities may be more docile in accepting the Wall Mart serfdom creed trying to participate in the wet American Dream, but I cannot imagine the locals in Europe being driven like cattle if the Dutch dykes were to burst, as many blacks were in New Orleans.

"Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan."

I just wonder who those Europeans are that downplay their national identity. I have certainly met none and I doubt he has either - unless he thinks about the European diaspora in the USA. And you have to ask too whether American WASP culture is accessible to people not already connected through blood, soil or money.

"Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of the main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well."

Maybe Professor Fukuyama thinks his gated community will keep the barbarians at bay, his feet dry and his pension fund intact, but could help things along better by promoting more Muslim immigration into the United States, secularising all societies and making drug dealing legal.

Delenda Carthago

You sometimes have to doubt that any world leader has learned from history, or even stayed awake during history lectures or classical studies.
Witness the flap the Iranian president Ahmadinejad caused when he called for the "destruction of Israel" during a speech to an anti-Zionist conference.
You would think this is the first time - shock/horror - a country's leader has called for the annihilation of another country. But everybody remembers that doofus President Reagan and his "We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes" joke against the Soviet Union, but of course nobody batted an eyelid because, well, wasn't the Soviet Union the archetypical Evil Empire for a generation brought up on Star Wars imagery and a Hollywood sense of foreign relations, and thus deserves a fate worthy of Darth Vader?
The call for the obliteration of the Enemy has a long pedigree. These days, respected American think tanks are named after classical luminaries (or their grandson) who called for wiping Carthage off the earth. Cato, the Elder ended all his speeches, as every schoolboy learning Latin knows, with:

Delenda Carthago! (Carthage Must Be Destroyed)

Iran's president simply follows in the footsteps of any potentate (Persian, Roman, you name it) who wanted to rid the world of any civilisation.

A letter from the motherland

My friend Tuck, from Kentucky, is on a European stint in Ireland. He hopped over to the Continent for some R&R and this is what he wrote (to his partner, Chuck, but I have permission to reprint, with the norty bits cut out):

"So, Belgium. You would really like it! Brussels is full of beautiful old buildings, the men are generally good looking (it is that French/Moroccan influence, I think). Every where you turn they are selling Belgian Waffles on the street corners, and you can buy cones of chips with mayo everywhere.
And there is such a local cafe scene too--all the things you like.
It definitely shows that Belgians love dogs--they are everywhere. I even found the Royal Dog Shop yesterday, and they sell upscale doggie accessories. And people take their dogs everywhere--even on the train, on their bikes, everywhere...
Today I went to this giant market that was incredible--food and clothes everywhere, it was huge. I then hopped a train and went to Brugge (one hour, 5 euro!) You would love Brugge. Apparently the canal that got all of the textiles (lace and tapestries, primarily) silted over so it destroyed the economy. People left in droves, and the town was not rediscovered until about 400 years later when folks were on the way to visit Waterloo, and some guy wrote a novel featuring it. And that pretty much sealed its fate, that it could not change much since then. So you have these buildings that are generally at least 400 years old, many older than that. So, lots of plazas and belfries, cathedrals, museums (I went to see the Rodin exhibit they had). Van Eyck is from there (my feet were exhausted from the cobblestones so I rested them on the Van Eyck plaza). I could definitely see going back to Brugge for several days--there is just so much to see there, really...
So going to continue touring around tomorrow, see what I can find.
Unfortunately the museums are closed tomorrow, so I may need to just check out the shops. Things are so much cheaper here that Dublin, it is very noticeable.
I'd love to live somewhere where French was the local language. Even 'laundromat' sounds so genteel here--'le salon lavatoire automatique'."

Pretty good assessment, I'd say, apart from the language thing: Brugge is a Flemish city and because most people speak French in Brussels you could be forgiven for thinking it is the national language (it is, but more people speak the other one of the three, Flemish - I leave you to guess the third one, and no, it's not sign language). Since we all speak perfect English nobody cares about this oversight, really.
If you're in the neighbourhood, go visit the newly refurbished Atomium, the pride exhibit at the 1958 World Fair. It's an enlarged representation of the iron atom, even though the structure is mainly aluminium. It's been buffed, spic and spanned and generally made shiny again after years of neglect.
The 1958 World Fair was HUGE for Belgians, and many people of my parents' age still speak fondly of visiting it. Except my mother, who was highly pregnant with me when it was on and she has really never forgiven me for missing out.