Friday, July 21, 2006

One of those days

*insert dave and the dynamos here*

beat chest

fall on floor coughing

no one said it was going to be easy, huh, theres a lot to be said for carpet

Monday, July 17, 2006

The joys of sharing

I share my flat with a Canadian girl. We have many over lapping interests, music being one of the biggest.

Its grand as she's a fan of guitar based music whereas my current listening habits / interests (have been for some years now) is of a much more electronic/dance bent.

The thing I am currently enjoying sharing is my collection and knowledge of NZ music, pushing countless Flying Nun albums on her for her digestion and appreciation and also digging out loads of old 7"s, 12"s and LP's of mine to revisit myself.

This has lead to my listening habits becoming even more random than ever. Roy Montgomery followed by a mix CD of Maurice Fulton is not for the narrow minded I would hazard a guess at but then I like a varied diet musically speaking.

Perhaps the thing I am enjoying the most is rediscovering songs and acts that I'd not bothered listening to for almost a decade, most of which I am pleased to say sounds as fresh and exciting to these ears as they ever did. Prior to this year, i was more inclinded to revisit songs that sprung to mind rather than entire albums, thus I am refinding and falling in love again with many a track I'd not thought about for often over a decade and better yet falling for some I hadn't thought much of at the time.

I'm not sure when I last listened to more than one Verlaines song, let alone sat through three albums worth... oh happy days, only made that much better by the current bout of beautiful days, tis almost summery.

In return I am discovering many a artist from Canada that I am digging big time and countless bands I read about but am not inclined to bother with personally.

A perfect complimentary environment one would think and it is :)

As they say; lifes to short for boring music!

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Are we doing our bit?

According to Sir Bob Geldof New Zealand is not doing enough for the world's poorest countries.

Sir Bob, 54, in New Zealand to speak at a business leadership conference, said the 0.27 per cent of gross national income (GNI) the Government gave to impoverished countries was stingy.

"The New Zealand Government, frankly, must up their game," he said.

"The pathetic 0.27 per cent that this Government gives to the poorest people on the planet... is a disgrace.

"The great shame of New Zealand is that it is the [third] lowest in the world with their generosity and this surely does not represent the spirit of the electorate."

www.nzherald.co.nz

The great shame here is for once I tend to agree with Winston Peters, from the same article: "But Mr Peters Sir Bob had got his facts wrong and the 0.27 per cent proportion was "well ahead" of the international average.

There were other aspects to New Zealand's contributions including the millions of dollars flowing out of the economy in remittances to Pacific countries, the significant contributions it made to peacekeeping, and its open economy that any country could trade with.

The quality of its aid, too, was important, and New Zealand's aid was "largely untied"."

Now I don't doubt for a fact that we could and should do more to help those in the world's poorest countries, not just as a nation but as a species - that is all nations and here we as such a tiny economy and state can only contribute so much in a monetary manner, we can be perhaps more proactive on behalf of those without in the various international forums we frequent.

Being a fiscually responsible nation we do our share in the Pacific, looking out for our neighbours and I believe generally we do a pretty sterling job of this.

Sir Bob is right, we could be doing more...

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

A letter from my personal banker

"Dear Bob,

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in the Campsite, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good

Regards

Melinda
Your Personal Banker

P.S.: Find enclosed your new Eft Pos Card"

Monday, July 10, 2006

Confessional of a terminal fool (part one of many no doubt)

So I was in the bank the other day, mouthing off to their customer service lady about their crap service... as ya do.

It was one of them days; you know wander up road, eft-pos some cash, buy fags kind of days or at least it should have been. But alas my eft-pos card was declined, as it had expired.

Thus into the bank I did trapse anger and malice on my mind. Friendly, helpful lady gets a earfull of my hatred of my bank - a long term condition that I feel justified in, for I bank and isn't that enough?

About halfway through my diatribe it struck me, this feels like deja vu and in a nano second my vocal outburst starting to revert back to the generally nice tones and friendly manner I usually employ as my foolishness started to sink into my mind - I'd done this before, not the bank me, I was at fault here not that I was going to let on to nice, friendly bank lady.

As she accepted my expired drivers license (I never updated to the new fangled ones, um, many years ago) to prove I exist, I once again realised I have nothing much that actually proves without huge doubt I am who I think I am, a terminal fool and plonker and human man to boot.

Well anyways the lady cancels the eft-pos card that had been sent out to my home (which I'd denied recieving) and organises a new one to be delievered to the branch for my collection today. She organises for a teller to sort me some cash and I leave head held high, muttering under my breath wot a fool am I.

The new card I shall of course collect sometime this week, probably 5 minutes after I realise I need some cash and don't have a working piece of plastic. I do hope the same lady is there as I don't realish the prospect of trying to prove I do actually live in this body, for none of the documentaion I have is current, contains a photograph or has evidence that I can actually consistantly sign my name ina similar child like scrawl as the one emplyed on any occassion that may be used as evidence.

Of course what I had realised part way through my rant at poor bank drone, was that I most certainly did recieve the cards sent out, but as I never open my bank mail I hadn't actually sighted said card or signed it immediately as they advise.

No big deal really, a simple oversight easily rectified. Or is it? For this is the third or fourth (maybe fifth) piece of plastic the bank has sent me in the past decade and on each and every occassion the same performance is undertaken by myself.

What is it about bank mail and me?

Why don't I learn from my stupid past behaviours, christ I am meant to be a grown up - grown ups don't behave like this - at least not in my mind, body maybe.

Theres a lesson to be learnt here Bob and fuck me if I've already forgotten what it was.