Angry Bert gets a day off work

I had this small problem with my gall bladder. It was fucking with me and I had options. So I exercised that option and had the pissant thing removed yesterday. This is the second one of my organs that I have had chopped out, my appendix went at the age of thirteen. The operation yesterday was far less stressful than my appendix, that time involved a doctor pushing his finger into my asshole and a very cute French nurse shaving me “down there”. No finger in the balloon tie and no unwanted erections, that sounds like success to me!

When the surgeon came to check on me a few hours later I did ask him if he had found a couple of condoms filled with heroin that I misplaced a few years ago. He laughed. Then he stared at me until I laughed.

 Oh, and thanks to my socialist health care system, I only had to wait 3 weeks and the Government picked up the tab. Great eh?

Someone get this guy off my television

All week I have been desperately trying to avoid this vomit-inducing coverage of Michael Jackson. Despite the fact that the twat was reviled and mocked by media and man for years now we have all been forced to watch one attention whore after another pressing themselves eagerly onto our television screens and babbling about all the wonderful things Michael achieved. The unspoken subtext is “let’s all forget the fact that he was a predatory pedophile”. I am sorry, I can’t. I would say more but really John Niven from The Independent says it so well…

“The barrage of utterly inane celebrity tributes (”inspirational”, “a true hero”, “a genius”, “a gentle soul” “a treasure”) was to be expected. The howling fans across the world, broken and gibbering nonsense for the rolling TV news crews (”he … he died for all of us” etc), the inevitable autopsy results in a few weeks, with their Swiss laboratory inventory of prescription tranquilisers, all this too is standard operating procedure.

What has stunned me and truly floored me in the past week or so has been the complete sidelining by the entire media of Jackson’s later life. Across the board, from every news channel to all the quality papers, there has been wholesale collusion in the notion that “he was a great artist and, yes, there was some, umm, troubling stuff later on, but let’s forget all that right now and just celebrate the music”.

Hang on a minute. I’m not the kind of person to start Paedogeddon-style witch-hunts gratuitously, but … I thought I’d find some real analysis of the “troubling stuff” somewhere. But here’s what we’re getting: “Another beautiful boy is gone, wiped out in an instant.” This was Germaine Greer in The Guardian. She made no mention at all of the multiple accusations of child abuse levelled at Jackson (although she was unintentionally hilarious when she wrote of his art no longer being fuelled by his ability to “run with the kids on the block”. Uh, Germaine, love, they’d be more likely to be running away from him). Rather, she went on to wax lyrical about Dionysus and Orpheus and how we should “salute this miraculous boy who will triumph over death … becoming immortal through his art”. Well, the ancient Greeks were certainly a culture that would have sympathised with some aspects of Jackson’s life.” Read the rest of his article here >>

Book reviewed: Too Fat to Fish by Artie Lang

You know, I think I am a pretty engaging writer when I can be bothered. Most of the time my writing here is simply me saying something appalling about some twat or other. And you know, when I get my shit together and finish that book I am writing I sincerely hope that I don’t end up writing a turd like this.

Honestly Artie, I know you are a comedian (never seen you) and I know you are on the Howard Stern radio show (you must have mentioned that a hundred times). But a book almost entirely composed of you giving handjobs to Stern and writing formulaic  drivel like “I really love bloke x, he’s really talented and a great person” about everyone in your life just seems like you have really low self esteem and understand you don’t really deserve the shit load of cash people keep throwing at you.

Personally, I thought this book was a complete fucking waste of time. Except for the buying-drugs-while-wearing-a-pig-costume story which was pretty funny. Except for that, which was outlined on the back cover for Crom’s sake, the whole book read like it was written by a 14 year old in a late night bender trying to make a deadline. You may be a talented comedian (and I’ll give you a mulligan on that since I can’t even be bothered youtubing you) but you are complete crap as a writer. Writers need to be interesting and understand how to engage over the long haul. You think saying fuck and bastard is edgy and really your drug stories are so 1992.

If anyone wants this book, leave me a comment with your address and I’ll post it to you for free.

The continuing tale of the Beagle Boys

Okay so there’s an update on the assholes who moved into my street. Apparently the landlord’s agent has had enough of getting phone calls from the other tenants and from neighbours like me and has given the “Likely Lads” 15 business days notice of an eviction.

Bloody good job, nothing worse than white trash.

Oh Great, It’s like Trainspotting Except Begby Lives Next To Me

Well that’s fucking great. The guy across the street has moved to India on a contract and has let his house out to the worst bunch of low life drug dealers you could imagine. It’s been a month and we have had (in chronological order) a neighbour threatened with a beating, a dead-fish overdose on the front lawn, a high speed chase followed by a police takedown and a 3AM attempted beating with an iron bar. Fucking nice.

Of course that sack sucker house owner doesn’t give a shit, he’s in fucking India, eating japatis and counting the cocaine tainted bills those criminals send him every month. Makes me want to throw a gallon of gas against their door. Fuck I hate living next to criminals.

Book reviewed: A Voyage Long and Strange, On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

This one took a while to get through, not because of any weakness in the book but because I insisted on leaving it in the bathroom (where I do my best reading), so it was read 4 or 5 pages at a time over a month or so. I am trying to read more North American history, especially American history so I can understand our cousins south of the border a little better.

Tony didn’t start out trying to write a comprehensive history of pre-Mayflower, he left out quite a few of the well known ones, including the frozen explorer on a stick Hudson after whom Hudson Bay is named. Also the Portugese got left out which was a little bit of a disappointment. But he did hit the highlights, De Soto (crazed indian killer), Coronado (a small spanish boatman adrift on an ocean of prairie grass), Columbus (so poor a navigator that he once suspected that the Earth was in fact pear shaped), John Smith (famous Disney character) and of course the Inquisition (nobody expected that).

Horowitz has done a great job of making history accessible. I enjoy history written in this way, designed for folks to wade through instead of drowning in. He has a great sense of humour and tries his best to laugh his way through some pretty heavy material, syphillis, genocide, rape, plunder, mo’ rape and slavery. One thing that I did find rather odd was the fact that English explorers met Indians in New England who were well acquainted with Europeans due to Basque fishermen fishing the cod fisheries for generations before the Pilgrims staggered across the Atlantic. The author only touches briefly on this factoid, I wish I knew more. I believe Google is my friend here.

You poor bastard

This was a little unsettling to read in the non-paper. Since there is basically only one family of us he’s a cousin many times removed. Poor bastard, killed for nowt in a failed nation that hated his guts.

New Zealand, judged most peaceful nation in the world

Okay, in the great propaganda wars it appears New Zealand has a great PR team. It has been announced by some bloody Australian think tank that Godzone is the most peaceful nation in the world.

I would make some observations…

1. It was an Australian think tank. That’s like an Irish temperance society.

2. I am a New Zealander and I am definitely not peaceful. Therefore it may be entirely due to the fact that I emigrated that pushed New Zealand to number 1.

3. We are now ranked with little tosser nations such as Denmark on lists such as greenest, weakest, invadable-ist, oil-less-ist and likely-to-sleep-with-ungulate-ist.

Can I point out here that the 10 least peaceful countries are either Muslim, oil rich, or next door to same. Do yourself a favour, hire a tug and tow your country next to a oil poor, secular state. I hear Iceland has berths going cheap.

Book reviewed: Columbine by Dave Cullen

I don’t generally read crime books, that’s more my wife’s bag. But there is a creepy fascination to be had in the tale of the Columbine school shooting. The fact that these two boys Erik Harris and Dylan Klebold advertised their intent so obviously, the way that Jefferson County law enforcement had ample warning that they were up to no good and the awful loss that resulted from those 20 minutes of teen anger. I came away from this book actually feeling a little sorry for Dylan. He didn’t seem like the killer type, evidenced by his very low bullet count compared to Erik and by his journaling which didn’t show a psychopath like Erik but rather a suicidal teen without enough drive to get himself out of an evil once he had committed to it.

Erik, on the other hand, was the primary character driving this whole thing, his plan, his bombs and his agenda. Nasty little piece of shit if you ask me. Without Erik Dylan would most likely have just been another teen suicide. Without Dylan Erik would still have gone to school and killed.

The way the book was structured, with a recounting of the killings coming early and then a series of flashbacks over the previous year laying out how the whole thing was constructed, it made it interesting and provoked me to consume the damn thing in less than a weekend. I regret buying this book from Walmart, but I do not regret buying this book

Update: The author, Dave Cullen, commented on this sort-of-review and seemed like a funny bloke with redeeming value extending beyond his ability to write a good book. So in an effort to move the Internet zeitgeist a little further to the left I offer this link, Columbine, in order to help his Google page rank.

Run rabbit run!

Ha, bloody ha! Apparently a couple back in my home town of Rotorua, New Zealand applied for a bank overdraft of $10,000 and instead the bank mistakenly deposited $10,000,000 into their account.

Of course they returned it. Of course they did a fucking runner and are now wanted by Interpol as fugitives. Rich, rich fucking fugitives. My head asplodes. Click here to read more if you want.