m(o)use droppings

My niece Giovanna and her friend put together this clip.

As well as rocking out in my parent's garden they're trying to warn people about religious fruitbats who accost kids in the street and make them do bogus tests in an attempt to get them to repent.

Once you do test you invariably get labelled a sinner with a one way ticket to Satan's summer camp.

While that doesn't really bother me too much it's a rather heavy trip to lay on an impressionable 13 year old.

The girls do a better job of explaining it on their blogspot page which you can find here.

Read my report on Bowl-a-rama, an international skate contest held in my home town, here

" 

It's uncanny, I'm amazed no one else has commented on the resemblance.

Okay I know I've been away a while, but hopefully things here will become a bit more regular. By that I mean regular chronologically, not regular normal. That's probably not going to happen any time soon. I've been flirting with blog writing on the website I work at. Things didn't work out so well hit-wise, so here I am.

Well there I go shooting my mouth off. After mouthing off about my mate I managed to smack my own knee into the concrete at the skate bowl on Sunday. No major damage mind you. For a while it did look like I had one of those calcified twins attached to my leg. I should have painted a face on it and sold my story to the tabloids.

A good day was had by all.

Well all except my mate Midge who broke his leg.

Oh well, at least that meant he had to stop skating and was able to take pictures.

During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I'll be growin a Mo. Ask nicely and I'll send you a photo. It's all about men's health and the fight against prostate cancer. Why... Every year in New Zealand 2,656 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 600 die of the disease, making prostate cancer the second largest cause of male deaths, after lung cancer. The average life expectancy of a man in New Zealand is 4 years less than a woman. To sponsor my Mo please go to http://www.movember.com/nz/do..., enter my registration number which is 107076 and your credit card details. Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the "Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand" clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 107076. Please mail cheques to: Movember, PO Box 87 150, Meadowbank 1742, Auckland. All donations over $5 are tax deductible. All donations are made directly to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand who will use the funds to create awareness, increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer, fund research and scholarship programs. Thanks for your support

What I did on my winter holiday

Okay things here have become rather sporadic. There's areason for that, I've been given blog space on the website I work at. Head over there for a gander.

A good 13 years ago Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon put out a classic country punk album with Mojo's mates the Toad Liquors.
Among the twisted gems on it was a track entitled Nostalgia for an age That Never Existed - its premise was that the golden days of yore weren't actually that golden.
The advertising industry is the biggest culprit when it comes to applying the rose coloured filters on reality.
Take the new Weight Watcher's campaign.
According to the TV advert a mere generation ago we were all outdoors types playing footie on the lawn taking the stairs and leaning up against the HG Kingswood in our Stubbies.
Apparently back then everyone was buff.
Since then, according to Weightwatchers, we've all gone to the pack and it's only taken one generation.
It's all escalators, fast food and couch surfing.
I remember the 70s, and they're not exactly telling the truth.
I grew up in Gisborne where taking the stairs wasn't an option, there were only about two department stores that had more than one floor.
The five storey Post Office was considered a skyscraper and riding the elevators was a thrill.
Most importantly not everyone had beach bodies to die for.
Back then togs were invariably by Speedo and a lot less forgiving. Believe me there was a lot to be forgiven.
It's true, there were people of fuller figure back then, I know, I was on the way to becoming one of them.
Weight Watchers would have us believe that over eating is a new thing too.
Vegetables routinely had all their goodness boiled out of them, the country's dairy mountain was turned into cheese sauce and poured over every inch of the plate and lard was a staple in every pantry.
When people killed the fatted calf they didn't de-fat it before they cooked it up.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Weight Watchers world is a complete fantasy.
The Vitas did own a succession of Kingswoods, I did wear shorts that showed off copious amounts of thigh and the front lawn was big enough for a decent game of two a side.
Sure it doesn't do any harm to take a look at the amount of food we put in and offset that against the amount of energy we put out, however the suggestion that we'd be better of if we partied like it was 1979 doesn't quite cut the mustard.

Without sounding too flash, I've just returned from a trip abroad.
Well, Australia to be more precise, which these days barely classes as abroad.
After many of the shops and banks are the same as here and my cell phone works fine, as does my eftpos card.
Say what you will, I was in the tropics and I've got mosquito bites to prove it.
I flew Virgin, an airline owned by Richard Branson, who, in the space of a few years, gave the world Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and Never Mind the Bollocks here's the Sex Pistols.
On the excite-o-meter Trans-Tasman flight is closer to the boredom of the former than the visceral thrill of the latter.
Virgin has made a deal with a photo processor and the airline's airsick bags double as a pack that can be sent off to get cut-price prints.
It takes all types, personally I wouldn't want photos of the contents of a sick bag.
Virgin is a no frills carrier meaning when you pay for a seat that's and a free magazine is about all you get.
I took a cut lunch and a couple of teabags to get me on my way.
To Uncle Richard's credit while he's not averse to charging three bucks for a can of coke and three fifty for a coffee he will give you a cup of hot water and sachet of milk for nix.
Scored.
It's interesting when you finally get to your seat, after having your hand luggage searched for guns, knives, forks, lipstick and deodorant you're told not to turn your cell phone, iPod, PSP or similar on because it could interfere with the plane's navigation system.
You could call me a sceptic if you like, but if an MP3 player can send a plane into an aerobatic spin that would do the Red Baron proud why aren't all the terrorists sitting under the headphones cranking up Like a Virgin on takeoff.

As someone who has been known to stay up late and listen to loud music in rooms full of jittery dancers you'd think I'd be rather put out with the impending ban on party pills.
Well it's not going to affect me as much as you'd think.
I'll admit I've popped a few of the pills some refer to as smart drugs (they're not) in the past but gave them up early on as they didn't seem to do anything to me that I found much fun.
Sure they keep you awake, but they can't guarantee your waking hours will be fun.
There's a universal law that says there's a tipping point in every social situation.
There's the build up as things get rolling - the euphoric fun part - then there's the plateau where things are still cool and you get your groove on.
Once you get past that the slide begins.
Things get a bit frantic and ugly as mascara runs and desperation in the air.
The secret to a good night out is going home and filling up the hottie before the witching hour.
That's when the pills become counter-productive.
Who wants to be the life of a dead and decaying party
Then there's the fluid retention thing.
Party pills give me the constant sensation of busting for a leak.
They also render me incapable of passing water.
Trust me that's a combination no one wants.
That said I'm not about to ring up associate health minister Jim Anderton and offer my services to help him eradicate the scourge.
Just because they're not for me, it doesn't mean I begrudge the club kids, long haul truckers and sleepy office workers their pick-me-ups.
Sure there are those who wolf them down like Smarties and end up in hospital, but if you ban party pills they'll just use something else.
The best solution would be to tighten up who can buy them and where they can get their mitts on them.
Maybe let people know exactly what's in the pills and what damage they do to important parts of the anatomy
It's a crazy strategy but it might have an impact.
After all it sort of works with that other dangerous party drug - alcohol.

Joan Jett sings one of my favourite Replacements songs and the vid features legends John Doe and Duane Peters

There's no getting away from it - most people watch motorsport for the crashes, rugby for the punch-ups and yachting for... OK you've got me, I don't know what people watch yachting for.
As much as we enjoy seeing sports people at the top of their game excelling and performing above their limit we actually enjoy it more when they push the limit too far or lose their composure.
I bring this up because as we all know sport is a metaphor for life and our reactions to on-field behaviour are paralleled in the way we look at day to day events such as the goings-on in Parliament.
It seems some of our parliamentarians believe they have an eloquence and verbal gift on par with a Roger Federer forehand and hence they want to stop cameras in the house catching them with their guard down.
We should be hanging on their every word without being sidetracked by the likes of Ron Mark flipping the bird or Steve Maharey using colourful language.
New proposed rules would prevent photographers and TV camera operators from snapping MPs in less than a positive light.
Apparently you'll only be able to take photos of MPs on their feet and there's be no close ups.
Also kicked to the curb is the footage of disorder or the use of material for satire ridicule or denigration.
That not only takes the fun out of it, but is a sure fire way to lose your audience. Parliamentarians should bear this in mind before voting on restrictions.
People need unpredictability and excitement to keep them interested.
There's photographic evidence to suggest the current state of play in the house barely keeps MPs from nodding off.
If they bland it out any more the rest of us will be asleep at the wheel as well.
Bring back the biff.

So there's another layer of bureaucracy between you and the your enjoyment of your car.

Well, that is if you're a practising Catholic.
The Vatican has a 35-page road code entitled Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road. God's driving guide even has its own 10 commandments which driving website Left Lane lists as:

1. You shall not kill.
2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
4. Be charitable and help your neighbour in need, especially victims of accidents.
5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
6. Charitably convince the young and not-so-young not to drive when they are not in a fit condition to do so.
7. Support the families of accident victims.
8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
10. Feel responsible towards others.

There's bit of a double up here.
I always thought you shall not kill was covered in the other commandments, but it seems that it was deemed necessary to spell it out lest believers tried to use the "I was in the car at the time" defence.
Likewise, the one about using your car for an occasion of sin seems superfluous.
A sin is a sin whether it be committed at home, at work, in a cheap motel or parked up beside the lake in a Fiat Punto with the windows steamed up.
The references to drink driving and road rage are admirable and the cyclist in me applauds the call to protect the more vulnerable party.
Interestingly the road code is part of a series of documents that includes Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of Gypsies.
Why Gypsies?
God only knows.
I thought they would have been covered in the blanket "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", but I must've missed the fine print that said except gypsies, tramps and thieves as well as gays, women who want to be priests and other groups to be advised on a case-by-case basis.

Without wanting to age myself too much, when I went to school buying your lunch meant stopping off at a dairy first thing in the morning, placing an order and having your food delivered at midday in a brown paper bag with your name on it.
The aforementioned food was invariably a pie (mince, for pie makers hadn't stumbled upon the notion of other fillings back then) and a donut.
At my house buying your lunch was a treat, something that you'd only get to do on special occasions.
Well it seemed that way, bur in reality it probably was more a case of my siblings and I running my mother so ragged she didn't get round to making our lettuce and marmite sandwiches.
Occasionally we were able to order food from the local fish and chip shop. However, the nuns looked upon you with scorn if you ordered a sausage or other meat related product on Friday.
Anyway, today it seems you don't have to order out to get your saturated fat fix as many school tuck shops have their own deep fryers.
Then there are machines that spit out soft drinks, lollies, chippies and other things that put dollar signs in the eyes of heart specialists.
For many kids, buying food at school comes down to choosing between having too much fat or too much sugar,
Kids all over are bursting out of their uniforms and the Government is stepping in and saying no more.
Oddly enough some schools have come back saying that it's not their fault the kids eat bad things; they're just giving them what they want.
After all it's the parent's job to teach their kids what to eat.
The same schools would probably say parents should also be teaching their children the potential harm associated with drugs and alcohol.
Perhaps they should open bars and tinny houses on campus as well.
If that happened, maybe truancy rates would fall as well.

Am I the only one who is quickly getting over the internet's much touted social networking component.
Every other week I seem to get an email invitation from one friend or another to join their online community.
Interestingly, I've never been invited to the same community twice.
No two of my online friends are members of the same sites and I've accumulated all sorts of cyber clutter.
So far I've got a Tblog, a Photobucket account, a YouTube channel, another photo space with someone called Ringo, and an ICQ number, as well as accounts with Wayn, sms.ac and others whose names escape me.
Oh yeah ? I'm also a member of an online skateboarding forum.
Anyway it always starts out the same - an email arrives I click on a link and am dragged of to some far flung corner of cyberspace where it's said I can organise my life, meet like-minded people share my photos and generally do lots of things I didn't realise I needed to.
These networks know what strings to pull to get me.
I joined one to see photos of my nephew/godson and others to catch up with long lost friends who are now based overseas.
Most recently I joined some kind of online address book site because the introductory email suggested that if I didn't reply the friend who sent me the invite might think I didn't like her.
Is my life more organised?
Well I might have a lot of cyber cupboards, but for the most part they're empty.
Instead of one address book with all my contacts in it I have lots of address books with one contact in them.
Maybe I'm being old fashioned, but this doesn't seem like an improvement.

So you can't sell a kidney on eBay, but you can offer one as a prize on the telly.
Dutch TV channel BNN is screening The Big Donor Show this weekend.
Rather than a show about large kebabs, it's a live high stakes reality programme where three kidney patients will compete to receive a new organ from the terminally ill, 37-year-old "Lisa".
The supposed aim of the show is to raise awareness of organ donation, but given BNN's track record in reality TV you have to doubt the company's sincerity.
The company is responsible for Shooting and Swallowing (about drug use) and This is how we Screw (oddly enough not a DIY show) both of which make their flagship show Big Brother look rather classy by comparison.
While the other shows just sound creepy and pervy at least they don't pose the judges and viewers the type of moral dilemma Big Donor does.
You see viewers participate in the decision by sending text messages to Lisa during the 80 minutes that it is on air.
It's all very well for the lucky winner, but when you're voted off this show you're really voted off.
I'm curious how viewers get to decide who gets a new lease of life and who gets to take their chances on the hospital waiting list.
Will they be dragging their portable dialysis units over obstacle courses a la Survivor or will they be hanging about in a house Big Bro style, trying to out wacky each other in an attempt to curry favour.
Anyway, if the show catches on I can see the celebrity variants.
After all there's a number of famous-for-being types and heroes of yesteryear lurking around the fringes of the limelight that are in dire need of personality transplants.
Now there's an issue that needs to be brought to the public's attention.

Just recently I was cruising Frontside Grind, an online bulletin board for old-school skateboarders.
It's a lively forum populated by guys who fondly remember a time when boards were wider and waistlines were narrower.
Anyway the one hot topic of discussion was the apparent slipping of standards by the manufacturers of Vans shoes.
Vans is one of the original skate shoe manufacturers and the company's name and logo go hand-in-hand with the sport.
According to one Frontside Grind correspondent the shoes aren't what they used to be.
At issue was Vans' basic shoe - that over the years has become less pointy and, according to some, also had a drop in the quality of canvas used in manufacture.
The ensuing discussion thread was lively to say the least, many skaters putting forward stories of shoes falling apart, others calling Vans wearers posers and that Converse sneakers were better.
Some people blame the fact that Vans is now owned by the same company that makes Lee and Wrangler jeans.
There you go, multinationals, profit-focus, falling standards.
However, before you take the moral high ground and lace up your Chuck Taylors it is important to note that Nike has owned Converse since 2003.
The unfortunate reality that is hitting my fellow skaters is that nothing is as it was.
Plastics have replaced metals on everything from cameras to cars.
Fruit and veges come shrink wrapped, stickered and uniformly sized with scant regard for how they taste Things used to be built to last, or in a way that meant they could be fixed up if they broke down.
Nowadays, it's easier to replace than repair.
Sadly the other side of the shoe argument is that the Vans I bought last year were cheaper than the ones I bought in the eighties.
We get what we're prepared to pay for.

One evening last summer at Wellington's Waitangi Park

So the pro-smacking brigade isn't taking it lying down.
Opposition to the child discipline bill was pretty much rendered null and void by National-Labour compromise allowing police to use discretion in taking action on a light smick-smack-paddy-wack, paving the way for it to pass into law in Parliament last night.
However, on the day of the vote opponents showed they weren't going to take it on the chin or the bottom or any other favoured corporal punishment spot.
Peddling their line about how not wanting to spare the rod will effectively turn good parents into criminals (to me the answer to that one is simple - keep your hands to yourself) they have launched a petition to force a referendum on the issue.
Currently as long as you can get 300,000 people to sign up to a petition you can have a referendum on anything.
Want a vote on free beer, just get 300,000 dipsomaniacs to sober up enough to put pen to paper.
However the referenda are non-binding so don't get your hopes up just yet.
Anyway, the criminalisation of parents is a smokescreen put up by the people who don't want to lose their god-given right to hand out summary justice to their offspring.
Once they found a way to couch their opposition that didn't make them sound like abusers they latched on to it like rabid dogs.
It's scare-mongering and bullying, just the sort of thing you'd expect from those who use force and intimidation as a means of control.
That's why it came as no surprise to me that the prospect of not being able to deal out state-sanctioned violence on their children upset one opponent f the bill to the extent that they threatened its author, Sue Bradford, with violence.A
Advertisement for the cause didn't come better than that one.

The daily paper from the town I grew up in did a feature on the record label I was involved with 20 years ago, F-Star records. There's a great picture of my band the Flaming Stars with it. It's odd looking at the guys with more hair and less gut, oh well you get that. Check it out here - http://www.gisborneherald.co.....

Irish cosmetics frim elave have made a nudie advert are chemical and therefore have 'nothing to hide'. It's novel way to sell skincare products. The ad went up on you tube but came down fairly pronto. It was probably more for the fact that it was selling something than for the nudity. It's made headlines across the globe so I guess it's done the job. Click here if you want to see it, but if you're sensitive to naked people it's best you don't.