Sapture

For the last week I’ve spent the better part of my daylight hours working hard for a large multi-national sportswear company giving their money away. It’s a very very large company and you would definitely recognize the name if I told you however I’m just not going to do it.

It’s a temp job of course and may last up to two weeks depending on how fast I can get rid of their money. I signed up with a new temping agency and like totally nailed the interview. If I nailed auditions like I nail temp agency interviews I’d be a big star now hanging out in Hollywood, Wellywood or Elijah Wood. If only auditions for major feature films were looking for ‘people familiar with Microsoft Word who can type fast’. I got 32 out of 35 questions correct in my Microsoft Word 2007 test and blazed the keyboard with a blistering 58 words per minute using only two fingers on each hand and a random thumb. I could see my temp consultant Skye was dead impressed with these results, so I followed it up by giving her my profiles, speaking in an Irish accent and running around the office like a deer. This didn’t interest her at all until I got 30 out of 35 on Microsoft Excel while crying in an American accent and the deal was done.

The people at this unnamed sportswear company are very nice and the Ultimate Beaver is nowhere to be seen…although I know he’s still watching me like one of Obama’s kill-satellites. It’s a lovely place to while away a few weeks and they even have Dilmah tea and free soy milk on tap so I shouldn’t complain… but I will. I have to use a thing called SAP. I’ve never used this SAP thing before however after googling it I discovered to my horror that it’s really popular and is used by lots of big corporations who should know better. It was created by some Germans who were obviously still upset about losing the war and decided to take their revenge by unleashing this behemoth of bad design upon the world. Here's a picture of them looking evil.

Ralf, Florian, Karl and Wolfgang

They cleverly took this photo in front of some pretty blossom trees to make them look less despicable but it hasn't worked. I'm not sure who the one is rocking the Stop Making Sense suit but he looks particularly evil and the tall one on your right could be touching himself and the guy next to him has only one hand and the one on your far left has no hands at all! Look how smug big suity man is, just because he's got two hands. He's even displaying them in full view just to make the other three feel bad. He's even a bigger wanker than tall boy.

I bet nobody uses SAP in Germany or if they do they use the really good version of SAP that doesn’t make you hold the Enter key down for 30 seconds to cycle through hundreds of  redundant warning messages about every transaction ever transacted.  Before I worked out I could just depress the enter key continuously I was whacking it as fast as possible as if I was competing in the 100m sprint in Hyper Olympic. If you don't know what I'm talking about go here and thrash your x and y's like it's 1984. Back then they even had Hyper Olympic video games in fish and chip shops and those in the know used a 20c piece to rub back and forth against the red run button until all the plastic had been rubbed away to the metal beneath. Once on a family holiday in Nelson all my brother and I wanted to do was player Hyper Olympics in the fish and chip shop. As I was younger I was given the labour intensive and RSI inducing job of thrashing my 20 cent coin while he hit the jump key for the 110m hurdles. We had a lot of success from this team approach so if you can find a friend to whack your space bar for you I highly recommend it.

Anyway, as I mentioned somewhere in this post I've giving money away. I don't know why I'm giving it away, all I know is I have to give heaps of it away before the end of the Australian financial year. What makes me very proud is that as I'm working in the Australasian Head Office of this global sportswear brand, I get to give lots of money back to sports shops in New Zealand. So far, my furious whacking has contributed thousands of Australian dollars to the New Zealand economy. Thousands of AU dollars = $3.14159265 trillion NZ dollars. I am saving the NZ economy one whack at a time. Every time I whack New Zealand gets my money shot. Everyone thinks John Key is saving New Zealand but he's not. It's me. The reason he does nothing but smile and blame the earthquake for everything before saying the earthquake will save the NZ economy is that he's noticed my huge deposits and can't believe his luck. Here's a photo of the moment when he found out what I was doing...

Ian Thorpe, John Key, Mrs Key, Robert Parker and a Pageboy

That grin has travelled well beyond Cheshire and is currently residing somewhere in Cumbria. I've heard Tim Burton has agreed to cast John as the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland II as long as he bumps the tax break up to 30% and changes the employment law so no Kiwi actors are allowed to use the toilet.

Bob's also in the running to take over from Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

Ian Thorpe just got married

The Internet is for George

It’s probably a coincidence that on the day my blog received its highest ever traffic the entire blogger.com site crashes, but let’s pretend it’s not. My wee blog has brought blogger.com which is owned by another wee company called Google to its knees. My blog stopped Google. My blog is so popular it crashed the internet.

Right now someone somewhere is switching the internet off to let cool down for two minutes to reboot its buffer before turning it back on again. They may also be trying the trick some IT savvy person told me about years ago of dropping your computer onto the ground from a height of 3-5 centimetres to jiggle its valves and transponderesistors. I hope it works. I would hate to think my post about Australian Masterchef was so popular it destroyed the greatest infopornological invention since Anita McNaught.

Luckily not everything has gone down. Microsoft Word is still running fine and I’m using it to write this while having a Skype conversation with the Microsoft paperclip. Seek.com.au is still working which is handy because I desperately need a short-term temping gig. If anyone in Melbourne is reading this and needs someone to do anything for something please get in touch...I’m very good at fixing computers. Twitter also seems to have survived my blog which is fantastic because I’m twitting with George Michael.

Yes, you read it right, George Michael. George and I are best buddies and he tells me everything about everyone, everyday. Regular readers will already know of my great admiration for George and may have even seen the photo of George and I which I will repost now...and no, it's not photoshopped.

Two days ago George had a press conference to tell the world he was going on tour with an orchestra. When successful pop-stars get to a certain age they tire of writing new songs and sing their old ones with an orchestra. The size of the orchestra is a measure of how successful they are. Sting had set the bar high with his 40 member Symphonicity tour, but George has given Sting one in the eye by announcing his Symphonica tour with a 41 member orchestra. George has an extra trombonist. There is talk that a stung Sting is thinking of adding an extra triangle player and a big nipple gongist so prepare yourselves for the mother of all orchestra wars. By the time George hits downunder there may be no venues left big enough to accommodate all his playing members.

Anyway, I knew about this tour a week before any of you because George told me.

Why he calls me people is anyone’s guess but he’s famous and eccentric so who cares. Yesterday he told me he’d been to the dentist...

I think he may have forgotten my name and is using the affectionate term ‘everyone’ because he is too embarrassed to ask.  His memory may be going but his sense of humour is as sharp as ever...

LOL! George tells me everything...

I thought he was upset with Blogger being down as well when he posted this...

So I replied with this...

But I must have got completely the wrong end of the stick because he came back with this…

I didn’t know how to reply to that so I didn’t reply. I hate it when he yells at me. I think he might be a bit drunk. Or stoned. Maybe both.

God, I hope he doesn’t go out driving again.

Reality Bites

I watched my first episode of the new season of Australian Masterchef last night. I spent an hour of my life watching two teams spend a whole night of their lives baking bread and I loved every doughy minute of it. Who would ever have guessed that watching people bake bread could be so riveting? Imagine the balls you'd have needed to pitch this show to a phalanx of TV executives all looking for the next Laverne & Shirley or BJ & The Bear.

"So, what happens in this episode?"
"Two teams bake bread and then some people eat the bread and decide which bread they like best."
"Is there a monkey in it?"
"No."
"Could there be a monkey in it?"
"No."
"Does it have a catchy theme song?"
"Not really."
"So, what's interesting about it?"
"What if one team puts their dough in upside down and then they have to put them back up the right way?"
"Yeah...that's getting interesting."
"And what if one team uses left-over dough instead of pre-fermented dough?"
"Wow, that could cause all sorts of problems!"
"And then the team that made all the mistakes ends up winning the competition!"
"We're sold...as long as there's a monkey in it."
"Would a big guy in a cravat do?"
"Yep."

I was riveted to the last season of Masterchef as well but now I can't remember anything about it, except that the guy who didn't win it was 8 years old and one of the top five is still on TV trying to convince me that Pizza Hutt pizzas are the bomb. Speaking of bombs my favourite bit of last night's episode was when George Calombaris or Basil Brush screamed, 'Boom Boom, bake the room!' as all the contestants baked...in a room. As an improviser I know you can't write gold like that, it just comes out in the moment, like diarrhea or jism.

I'm constantly in awe of the creators and makers of these reality shows. How they can make an activity as Anthony Mundine as baking bread even remotely interesting is beyond me. The quick walking always helps. It must take weeks of training to get those contestants to all walk really quickly for a few seconds and then slow down to normal speed at the exact same time. What if one kept quick walking right into the oven and ended up as a ciabatta? That would be fabulous TV but you know it's never going to happen because then it would be obvious which team would lose.

"I liked the blue team's ciabatta more than the reds."
"Why?"
"It didn't have a corpse in it."
"Boom boom, let's bake the tomb!"

They also structure the show so that not only does the episode end on a cliff-hanger, there's also a cliff-hanger before every ad break. Even the ad-breaks are cliff-hangers as people in the show try to get you to buy stuff used in the show. Will the handee towel stop the egg from dripping on Matt Preston? Can the pretty blonde man cook a meal for everyone in the world for less than $10? Will those things you put in your vagina really stop LBL? Then they repeat the cliff-hanger after the ad-break just to keep you hanging a little longer. When they finally tell you whose buns were better the release is life-changing...like diarrhea or jism.

Of the top of my head I have watched reality shows where people compete to be the best at:

staying in a house
staying on an island
staying on an island and not rooting anyone
finding Phil Keoghan
renovating a house
doing the garden
dancing
singing
dancing and singing
dancing and singing like Michael Hutchence
cooking
not eating
making clothes
wearing clothes
making a rich single man fall in love with you
making a farmer fall in love you
making a transexual fall in love with you
making Flavour Flav fall in love with you
making Mark Philippoussis fall in love with you
making Donald Trump fall in love with you
grooming a dog
grooming Donald Trump

I'm sure there's many more. Just as 80's TV shows like Different Strokes, Hello Larry & The Facts of Life used to merge together when ratings declined, there is no reason why reality shows can't resort to the same ploy. All the overweight people from Biggest Loser could be forced to eat what the contestants on Masterchef have cooked and then the one who's gained the most weight could fire the chef who cooked for them before they get eliminated themselves. Or the one who gained the least weight could make another player eat all the bread baked by the red team including the ciabatta with the corpse in it. Or Phil Keoghan could stand in the middle of the Project Runway runway as a roadblock and the models have to work out how to get round him before Flavour Flav catches up and roots them on Donald Trump's tropical island. The possibilities are limitless.

Tonight I will find out which chef has been eliminated which means there's only 24 chefs left! At this rate we should know who's won just before the sun goes red giant and envelops the Earth in its firey gases.

I'm also hoping to find out what LBL is.

State Of Dux

I'm back in Christchurch, or what's left of it. At the moment it's more accurately named Christchurchless after God decided to shake things up a bit to see which of his houses was built on sand.

It was a beautiful day on Sunday and as there were no churches left to go to pray to God to stop knocking down churches, I ventured into the city centre with my folks to see what was left of my hometown and most importantly to see firsthand the state of The Dux. International readers who have never been to Christchurch will be in the dark as to what The Dux is, so here's a link to shed some light. Locals used to flock religiously to The Dux every Sunday to honour the holy spirit of their choice by tipping it down their throats until they started talking in tongues. If God had built the Dux if would have gone something like this...

And God said, ‘Let the beer under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land The Dux, and the beer that was gathered together he called Dux Lager, Blue Duck and Nor'Wester. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it and create a vegetarian restaurant next door. And it was so. And God saw that it was good. And there were buffalo chips and nachos.

At the moment The Dux is out of action. Christchurch without The Dux is like New York without the Big Apple, London without Big Ben or Sex And The City without Big. It's not the same, it's doesn't sound right and Carrie will never be happy with anyone else. For most of my life The Dux was the only place you could go get a drink without meeting a dickhead. The Dux was also my theatrical local and provided a place of refuge and therapeutic inebriation to make it through hellish three show days of dressing up in a green boiler suit with a foam rubber Godrizza head on. I've vomited in The Dux toilets, I've dropped a pitcher on a small dog and I've witnessed the unforgettable sight of an inebriated Simon Peacock circling Elric Hooper and Sam Neil in The Dux courtyard as a horny velociraptor.

So, here are some photos taken with my budget Lumix. The rest of this post will be largely made up of photos so if you only read my blog for the articles, best move on to Playboy, Penthouse or Skinny & Wriggly.

Let's begin with an arty photo of The Court Theatre entrance...

Notice how the metal barrier is perfectly in focus but the theatre is out of focus. It's very symbolic and I have no idea how I did it. Everything looks OK from here, but is it?

No, it's not. From a distance it looks like the buildings could be patched up reasonably easily but even with the crappy zoon on my Lumix you can see that the cracks run long, deep and expensive. About a $100 million worth apparently.

I then wandered down Worcester Boulevard to Le Cafe, place of late night hot chocolates and long in depth debates about whether you should finish a show with Arms then Puppets or Puppets then Arms.

Nobody will be drinking hot chocolate here for up to four years according to Arts Centre management and you should always finish a show with puppets. Zooming in again...

Pretty bloody lucky the whole thing didn't fall down. Now let's have a look at the Hereford Street side.

I think this is where they are storing all the bits of masonry that came down to hopefully stick back up again at some point during the next four years. From what I've heard the interior of the Arts Centre is a lot worse than the outside. This was the best shot I could get of one of the inner courtyards with a cherry picker getting ready to pick some deliciously large and ripe cherries.

And now, what you've all been waiting for, an out of focus shot of The Dux!

I'd seen The Dux out of focus many times but never like this and it was a little upsetting. It was a perfect sunny Sunday, there were heaps of tables free in the courtyard, I knew there was beer for Africa inside these slightly shattered walls and I couldn't get my lips on any of it. Let's put things into focus now...

I think this is where the fireplace was which would make sense as every chimney is Christchurch has fallen down in protest at subsidised heat pumps. This bit of The Dux doesn't look too good however you will be relieved to know the rest of The Dux looks OK.

What aren't OK are the St. Elmo apartments just opposite The Dux on the corner of Hereford and Madras...

...which aren't there anymore.

Dick Sinke, the owner of The Dux says he can get the place open in a month however The Arts Centre have said nobody is allowed in for four years so they can turn the whole place into the Bob Parker Music Conservatorium for Musical Page Boys. Dick has taken the fight to the man by setting a Facebook page and asking people to write messages of support for The Dux on colourful cut-out ducks. Here's a photo of mum and dad reading a few of them and here's a particularly poignant duck...

Two more photos to finish. The first is looking out over the Autumnal Dux courtyard that I dearly hope will one day be filled with happy Christchurchians. Note the  statue of Dick Sinke in the foreground.

And finally another symbolic one. I saw this as I was walking along Rolleston Avenue. It's half a poster for our Complete History of World Rugby show that had its season cut in half by the earthquake.

We're bringing the show back to Christchurch in September for the Rugby World Cup and I'd love to have a drink at The Dux to celebrate. I hope someone can make it happen.