I am Al Bundy and Hillary Clinton's love child

We have diagnosed you as most likely being a member of the: Autonomous Rebels (tribal members include the Clintons, John Lennon and Martin Luther King - nuff said!)

You also show a similarity to the following tribe(s): Disengaged Darwinists (tribe includes Al Bundy and Paul Martin - where are these survey people coming from?)

In Catherine Tate's East End Nan Taylor's immortal words: "What a f***ing liberty".

Almost time to visit the naked natives

I see that Waiheke island and New Zealand are featuring in several local newspapers in Massachussetts:

"Take a half-hour sail across Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf to Waiheke, the Martha’s Vineyard of New Zealand - only imagine Martha’s Vineyard 50 years ago, a charming, unspoiled place called home by grape growers, fishermen and artists. Accommodations are small inns and B&Bs and natives swear the air and water temperature is always 10 degrees milder than it is on the mainland.
Spend a day exploring the remnants of more than 50 native Maori villages, then mountain bike the rolling hills or hike from vineyard to vineyard (carrying plenty of bread and cheese for a picnic). Waiheke means “cascading water” in Maori, and its idyllic beaches are a key attraction. A few hours basking on Little Oneroa or nude Palm Beach, and you’ll be ready to take on the rest of New Zealand."

I have no idea whether Waiheke looks/feels like Martha's Vineyard as I've never been there (let alone 50 years ago). The "50 native Maori villages" are unfortunately only in Ms Miller's mind and one wonders whether she has actually been here. There's a marae (traditional Maori meeting house) that you can visit but it's not really billed as a tourist attraction, it is an integral part of Maori society here. "Nude Palm Beach" is spot on and a highlight for any traveller to our island - there's really nothing better than getting down and naked with the natives on the beach for a taste of local life.
If you decide to come, plan a summer holiday (Christmas to Easter) here, it was freezing this morning!

I so need a holiday

Only 43 sleeps until we're going on holiday. I haven't had a proper one for ages. We're going back to the Cook Islands for nine days of blissful beach recovery. Same place as last time in 2004 and I don't expect anything will have changed one jot.

Soccer World Champs Golden Stud

Since we're on the subject of football totty these days, described by one cultural critic as "sporno", you can now vote for your own favourite cross-pollinated football pin-up/male flesh wet dream come true and playing on field in Germany here. Click on "Kies uw WK Stud".

No prizes for guessing whom I voted for.

Rural Bachelor of the Year (an update)

We mentioned it to you before and now this year's pageant was held last weekend in Hamilton.

From the press release:

"The bachelors battled it out for the ‘Golden Gumboot’ trophy and their share of over $30,000 worth of prizes while experiencing an unforgettable week of celebrity status. They were hosted in the ‘secret bachelor pad’ for the week with all expenses paid."

At first sight I'd go for Matiu Noakes (pictured left), but why do all their perfect dates have to be so corny? A hot, sweaty, grunty night in the secret bachelor pad is all I'd be after!
Who's your favourite?

Christen Dimond (first on the profile list here) won the title.

Turning passion into love is a relationship's main task

If your culture invents the campest art form (opera) you would think it has little trouble with deviant sex. But no, Italy is hardly known for a fantastically open out of the closet queer culture. Au contraire, gay culture seems to be one of the most closeted I have come across, for a country that has been part of the liberal west for a long time. The men may walk arm in arm along the street there, but you cannot presume they have are anything else but friends. Last time friends of mine visited Italy they had huge trouble finding any gay clubs or saunas. Do I have to blame that church organisation in Rome again for this?
In contrast, queer representation in Italian art, be it cinema, literature or the plastic arts, has huge abundance: Fellini, Pasolini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Versace... But when it comes to day-to-day Italian boys getting it on together, lovingly approved by La Mamma and patronised by La Famiglia, it's a totally different situation from, say, in Spain where the boys can get married and people like Almodovar have made a lifetime film career out of it.
We watched a wonderfully romantic Italian film last night called La Finestra di Fronte, which has a terribly sad gay side story of a young pastry chef who saved a lot of people during the war from deportation but had to sacrifice his secret lover to the Nazi round-up. If you have working gaydar you deduce that his secret hidden love is not heterosexual really soon but it takes almost until the end of the film for this to become explicit.
Highly recommended and the totty award goes to Filippo Negri (left, husband of the film's main character, and doesn't appear enough times shirtless for my liking)

DNA sampling

"An Auckland criminal lawyer says some of his younger clients have been offered cigarettes while being held in custody in return for giving their DNA profiles for inclusion in the national database.
The claim was one of several received by the Herald yesterday after a woman alleged her teenage son was coerced into providing a DNA sample to get out of a $400 traffic fine.
Auckland lawyer Graeme Newell said the inducements had been going on for years. While some of his clients waited inside cells for their bail application to be heard, police officers had asked them whether they would be willing to volunteer their DNA. [...]
The definition of what a "voluntary" sample meant was a grey area, Mr Newell said. Being held in custody was inherently coercive."

Probably the only job in the police force I wouldn't turn down: sampling DNA from 17 year olds. Of course in the old fashioned, Jackass "sperm-olympics" way. Copious samples could be donated to the sperm bank afterwards. No point in letting good samples go to seed.

Which member of the Carry On Team am I?

UK TV re-running various Carry On films had us at times spewing, guffawing and simply helpless with laughter.
So which character do I resemble?

Which member of the Carry On Team are you?

Joan Sims. You are immensly versatile. You can be a nagging old bag one minute and a super sexy vamp the next. You are happy behind a bar whether it be a pub with Sid James or a Saloon in Stodge city. What a holster!
Take this quiz!

Versatile? Definitely.

Football as the new religion

As if you needed further proof that god is dead and football has taken her place, adidas paid for this fresco to be painted on the roof of Cologne train station, to celebrate the world cup soccer finals. I can see this catching on as a trend to brighten up the retractable roofs over the stadiums, now that they are considered the new cathedrals. Michelangelo would have approved, even though a few more ignudi wouldn't have gone amiss.
Picture via Towleroad.

Power blackout on Waiheke Island and in Auckland

It was an interesting day yesterday. Big snow storms down on the South Island and gale force winds in Auckland knocking out power lines.
Our island wasn't spared either but since it was my day off work I was little affected. Plus the power at our place only wobbled but never failed, unlike in other parts of the island where powerlines were blown over causing Oneroa, Onetangi and Palm Beach to enjoy the stormy weather without their customary hot cup of coffee.
The waves rolling in from the ocean were simply awesome, crashing into the rocky headlands that fringe the beaches and coming up to the roads near the beach. No surfers though.
Ferry sailings were cancelled between 8am and midday so for a while were truly marooned on our island. No rush on the supermarket though. But it was an interesting experience since Civil Defence after all its exercises and rapid response training basically said that everybody will have to rely on themselves to get through any emergency. No cavalry will come ride over the hills to your rescue (or gunships off the coast, in our case).

Am I bothered? Do I look bothered?

The BBC Board of Governors okayed the use of the word "gay" to mean "rubbish":

"The word “gay” now means “rubbish” in modern playground-speak and need not be offensive to homosexuals, the BBC Board of Governors has ruled.
A listener complained after Chris Moyles dismissed a ringtone by saying on his Radio 1 breakfast show: “I don’t want that one, it’s gay.”
The complainant argued that the use of the word gay in this context was homophobic. The governors said, however, that Moyles was simply keeping up with developments in English usage.

and the gay guardians are up in arms about it:

"Troubling? Absolutely. Whenever someone outside a cultural group adopts such a charged term to apply a derogatory meaning, it's a step backward. There's plenty of debate within minority communities – whether gay, black, or physically disabled – on whether offensive words should even be used within their community, let alone by anyone else. But an outsider throwing around "gay" to mean something patently unsavory — because "young people" deem it okay? We shouldn't even have to raise the argument about anyone but people of color using the word "nigger."

Oh dear, precious queens up in arms about cultural appropriation. How deliciously ironic after all those protestations over the last 50 years by heteros shocked by the redefinition of the word to mean something not quite what they envisaged the word to mean.
I've never liked the word gay to describe my particular passion, because it always sounded so innocuous, so bland, so white picket fenced and completely out of step with my particular tastes, smells, sounds and vision in man on man action. So I have no particular problem with the re-definition: language use will always evolve and it will involve fashions among the young and brainless which no-one should be upset about.
The "nigger" analogy doesn't compute, helas, because that is about the appropriation of the insulting term by the targeted minority (as queer is). "Gay" has outlived its usefulness and should in future only be used to denote a marriage arrangement that isn't "sad" (i.e. heterosexual)

When Marines go feral

As the official investigation into the Haditha incident, where Marines in Iraq allegedly murdered two dozen Iraqi civilians because one their troops was killed by a roadside bomb, glacially proceeds, our thoughts inevitable turn to the appropriate punishment should they be found guilty. Rumour has it they may face the death penalty - although "Right Blogistan" is demanding the head of Representative Murtha instead for being a traitor to the troops by digging into the issue.
So what would be an enlightened penalty for murdering civilians while being in uniform in the Government's service?
Well, some lateral thinking is needed here: how to minimise the cost to the taxpayer for keeping them locked up for the rest of their life (if we discount the death penalty), how to appropriately punish them for the rest of their lives; and how to humiliate them sufficiently and continuously so they act as a deterrent for a future repeat?

I know:
You lock then up in a Big brother style prison, being webcast 24 hours a day and subscribers can tell them what to do if they want to earn any money to keep themselves alive. It doesn't have to be all sexual perversion, but I bet that would generate more viewers and cash rather than sitting around chatting inanely. And they could give ActiveDuty.com a run for their money. A win-win-win situation for everybody involved: the Marines can strut their macho stuff 24 hours a day, the taxpayer makes some money and the punter gets off. Even the Pajamahadeen wouldn't need to get away from their computers to support their troops.