A few of my favourite things...

I'm nearly at the end of week two of an eight week tour of duty in Christchurch. I just went to that link I just linked to and it welcomed me to the future christchurch.co.nz website however we don't seem to have reached the future yet because it's not working. By the looks of things in the future we will all be speaking another language where every sentence starts with 'lorem ipsum' although it does tell you that the temperature in Christchurch was 11 degrees on July 23 2006.

That's the best thing about Christchurch, time stands still. I bet if you come here in the year 3009 things won't have changed much. The square will still be a bit rubbish, there will be cyboyg racers in modified hover cars and old people's heads preserved in jars of bubbling liquid will moan about the price of heat pumps on telepathic talkback stations.

It's easy to moan about Christchurch so I'm not going to. Instead I'm going to tell you a few of my favourite things that only Christchurch has to offer. So, in no particular order...

1. The Magnolia tree down my folk's drive.

Look at this pretty puppy. There are heaps of magnolia trees in Christchurch and right now they are flowering beautifully but they are all shit compared to my mum and dad's magnolia tree just outside the bedroom window. This is the mother of all magnolia trees and as I back the Corolla (more on this soon) down the drive and knock a few of the flowers off with the wing mirror I feel blessed that the Cooper magnolia tree shits all over every other magnolia tree in Christchurch and probably the world. Last year mum and dad awoke to find two Japanese tourists up the drive taking photos of each other in front of it. It's that popular. If you think you have a better magnolia tree post a picture of it or shut your pie hole. Words are meaningless, images are everything. This photo isn't even the best it's looked, it looked heaps better a few days ago but it's still better than your magnolia tree isn't it. Yes....yes it is.

2. The weather.

The weather has been really nice.

3. The Court Theatre bar.

I'm down here doing a play at The Court Theatre. The Court Theatre, like Christchurch is another place where time stands still. Everytime I rehearse in the upstairs rehearsal room the ghosts of old actors surround me and the voices of Peacock, Wilson, Cooper (another Cooper, no relation), Fogarty, Butt-Walker, Corbin, Gorman, Glubb, Spargo, Cosgrove, Olivier, Jacobi, Richardson and Gielgud seem to whisper in my ear, "What the fuck are you doing back here?". I wonder where they all are now? Thanks to Facebook I know where they all are now, except for Gary Gielgud....I wonder where he is now? Anyway, the best thing about the Court is the bar where like time, the prices have stood still. As a member of the theatre company I can get booze so cheap it would makes your eyes water and drip into your glass of booze so your booze would be made up of your own tears which may have some alcoholic content but would still be more expensive than my booze. My booze is cheaper than your own tears, it's that cheap. The barman/woman at the Court have been great as well. For most of my life I was served by Jan who was brilliant and wouldn't serve gin to anyone under 40. Then there was a lovely man with the brilliant name of David Bain who has just left to make barrels for Peter Jackson. Next up is an Anglican priest apparently...brilliant. There is no better feeling than drinking booze before an early show on Mondays and Thursdays and knowing you are paying less than all the moaning geriatrics who normally get things cheaper than you. They have worked hard their whole life, fought in two world wars and your booze is at least $2 cheaper than theirs. Brilliant!

4. KFC.

Regular readers will know about my love for the dirty bird. There's a drive-through on Papanui Road on the way home from the theatre. What makes it even more special is that I get to drive through in....

5. The Corolla

This is the kicker and makes every trip to Christchurch worthwhile. When I'm down here I get to cruise around in this. Yes, you're not hallucinating, this pimped out piece of Japanese perfection has fuckin louvers. Louvers at the rear! This is a 1989 Toyota Corolla, 5 door, touring also known as the sexiest car ever made and I get to drive it every day and watch the faces of all the jealous locals who wish they were driving it and I'm not even a local anymore. This thing drives like it looks, moderately well. Here is a link to a wee film to see it in action.

So many good things. I was hoping to get to 10 but I have to stop here and go and learn some lines. I will finish the list in the next post. If you would like to go for a ride in the Corolla or just stroke my louver let me know.

May contain nudity

Following on from my last post which featured a disturbing bar graph I present you with a disturbing line graph to illustrate a disturbing trend that is disturbing me. The john legend is as follows: blue line = comments on blogger, red line = comments on facebook and yellow line = likes on facebook. It doesn't take a chart whiz to notice a downward trend on all three indicators of my blogs impact and I'm disturbed by this. John Legend had hits with "If You're Out There", "I Used to Love You" and "P.D.A (We Just Don't Care)" which just goes to show that John has suffered through a disturbing case of blogmalaise as well. I am determined to reverse this disturbing trend and have decided to resort to the only two marketing methods I know, fit birds and nudity.

After minutes searching the internet I have found a picture of a very fit bird indeed and here she is. What a dirty little minx, look at the provocative way she is holding that door with her hand hovering over the knob as if to say "My door is always open and my hand is right over your knob" or "Come inside and let me touch your knob" or "I like this knob" or "Wow, there's a knob on both sides of this door, I love a knob on both sides" or "This knob is silver, like the Lone Ranger's horse, I would like to ride the Lone Ranger's horse or your knob" or "Fancy a root?" Images like this verging on really really soft soft porn are guaranteed to increase readership and comments in the short term and alienate and sicken people in the long term which is exactly what I'm after.

I bet you all really fancy her don't you, I'd love to know what you're up to with her in your sordid imaginations even though she's probably unobtainable. Well, prepare to vomit in your mouth, that saucy minx who you're fantasising wildly about right now is actually ME in a DRESS. I know, it's hard to believe isn't it, it's like one of those reality dating shows where you find out right at the end that the winning woman has been dead the whole time and nobody realised, except the small boy who could see dead women. Yuck, yuck, yuckity yuck. Go and have a shower and let's never speak of this again.

I dressed up like this for a conference in Rootaroa last week with Jared who regular readers will recall bravely braved four days at the Food Show with me. The theme for the conference dinner was prom night and I was last years prom queen Candy and he was Randy. All the delegates dressed up as well. I got felt up by men because it's not gay to feel up another man when he's dressed as a woman so it's OK and there's nothing gay about it, because he's got screwed up paper as boobs and he's wearing a dress...so it's not gay...OK. I also got groped by middle aged women but that's not sexual harrassment because he's a man dressed as a woman and I'm a woman and woman love to grab each others bits, have pillow fights in their nighties and talk about riding Silver. Jared had his tackle groped by a large English man dressed as Gene Simmons but that's not gay because Gene probably goes both ways.

Conferences are great fun, especially when you don't have to sit through the endless tedium of train-wreck presentations backed up with endless powerpoint bollocks. No matter what company it is and what product or service they are peddling, 90% of conference presentations spout the same old crap that everybody knows anyway...stuff like this:

"We must work together as a team to exceed the customer's expectations everytime and provide a service second to none in this competitive environment to survive the current recessionary climate. Margins! We must be lean and dynamic and approach every opportunity with the knowledge that our actions reflect the brand and all of us are the most important resource and together we can win and make our targets. Margins! My door is always open and I will endeavour to implement all your ideas to make this organisation more effective. Margins! We must all think of the bottom line and think outside the square and think differently from our competitors. Margins! We must be harder, faster, stronger. Margins! We are a winning team and together we will win."

This can be summarised as:

"Make your targets or lose your jobs."

After hours of this you may be invited to go to a break-out room where you listen to more of it in smaller groups and write on a big bit of paper in different coloured felt pens. Then you read the words you have written, words like 'brand awareness", "customer focus", "symbiotic" and "follow-up" before the bits of paper get screwed up by the facilitator to be used as boob stuffing for the piss-up in the evening.

Then it's time for some team-building where you thrash a drum for a couple of hours in unison or run around blind-folded tied to a cow with your team-mates hand up it's arse to guide it around all your other team members lying naked in the shape of your company's logo.

Then you go back to your hotel, put a wacky costume on, go and get slaughtered, try and cop off with someone or tell your CEO what a bellend he is before kissing him and vomiting in his mouth. Wake up at 6am with a steaming hang-over, return to conference venue and repeat if you still have a job.

I'm sure some of you have some fantastic and saucy conference stories so why don't you comment on this blog and share them. If I don't reverse my disturbing trend I will resort to nudity in my next post and that really will be disturbing for all concerned and ruin my chances of becoming Prime Minister of America.

You have been warned.

GP Abuse

The last four days of my life have been spent at the Auckland Food Show, and event where over 30,000 people are treated to "a stellar array of the very best in food and wine." For $22 you can spend 8 hours wandering around three gigantic halls of delictable delights, sampling smoked paprika flakes, wagyu beef and Paul Holmes Extra Virgin Olive Oil. You could even sample Paul Holmes himself as he was there, apparently he tasted rich and meaty with a good nose.

For $22 you could also spend 8 hours wandering around three gigantic halls getting absolutely rat-arsed. After four days of meticulous observation and statistical analysis I have prepared the following bar graph.There's something about us Kiwis and free alcohol that makes us act like the Kurgan out of the fantastic film Highlander. We start driving on the wrong side of the road, try and chop other people's heads off and lick priests. I remember being in the New Zealand theatresports team in Los Angeles in 1994 and we all went to a party in Malibu where there was lots of free beer. It was lots of horrible American beer like Budweiser and Miller Lite however that didn't stop us and we began to drink the stuff as if it was little bottles of Bella Swann's blood and we were all Robert Pattinson. I was at a loss as to why none of the other teams were following our lead, the Danes came and pawed at a bottle, licked the rim a bit and wandered off to sniff each others bottoms, the Germans dipped their sausages in and marched off to invade the dance floor and the South Africans just sang their new national anthem over and over again. Even the Aussies were restrained. We got rip-roaringly drunk and my team-mate Simon fell of a fence during the 45th singing of the new South African national anthem much to our amusement and nobody elses. We couldn't help ourselves, it was free.

At the food show you could go and get lots of free wine samples and by midday people were staggering around being low rent and obnoxious. I was dressed as a Belgian beer maker in full Shakespearian attire with a large grey moustache and the drunk people just loved me. On the Thursday I was Napoleon Bonoparte with very large pantaloons that I had to hold up for fear of exposing my little general to the general public. I won't go into details as to why I was dressed like this, it was incredibly creatively fulfilling and I produced some of my best work and I can now pour a very good pint. The point I want to make is that the general public are arseholes.

They really are. I'm sure there is some equation to prove the number of dickheads increases exponentially in relation to group size, alcohol consumed and ridiculousness of the costume you're wearing. Perhaps something like this:

Jared and I were giving away free beer and even then a lot of them were rude and belligerent. They had paid their $22 and that meant they were going to get drunk, their children were going to get drunk, they would eat enough to last them for a week and their children could kick Napoleon in the balls. Jared who was slowly dying alongside me, actually heard some delightful father say to their whining spawn, "No, we're not leaving, you haven't eaten enough yet." Last year I used the ancient put-down line, 'If I wanted to hear from an arsehole I'd fart' to some large man who wouldn't shut up and then he promptly proceeded to pull down his pants and show me his arse-hole before falling over and spilling his free glass of beer over his own anus. The image is forever burned on my retinas, like I'd stared at a big brown sun. This happened at 2pm on a Sunday.

I'm not sure why this happens. Sure the booze plays a part, however even without it, the general public are stupid, rude, dumb, thick, annoying, punchable and a bunch of muhs. It should be compulsory for everyone to work at least six months in a service industry, either in a cafe, bar, in retail, dressed as Napoleon and then maybe they would understand how horrible they as members of the general public have been and change their ways. Yes, I admit it goes both ways, there have been many situations where I have smiled and been very plesant while ordering a coffee only to be graced with a look reserved for someone who has farted in a broken lift. Bad service is intolerable however if you, as a member of the GP have given bad customerice you should expect bad service in return. You hear stories about waiting staff spitting, or whacking off into the food of rude diners however if they were allowed to do it in front of the diners at the table it would be much more effective. If I'd been allowed to do that while dressed as Napoleon I would have felt much better. I would probably be in hospital, but would feel much better.