Lands For Flags Of Course

I was fourteen when I flirted with politics for the first and last time. I can't remember why I wanted to be Chairman of the Casebrook Intermediate School Council but I did and won and wondered why I did. There were three students standing against me and we all got the chance to speak to the school for five minutes max because back in the 1980s we all had a short little span of attention and called each other Al. The others had lofty aims to make the pies warmer and the school pool warmer and the Winter warmer but my only policy was to build a wall around the school to keep Mexicans out. What swung it for me was my happy ending. If you were alive in 80s New Zealand you'll undoubtedly remember a TVC featuring the Kiwi Elvis, or Kwelvis,  John Rowles. Here's a link to watch him belt his big hit 'If I Only Had Time' in France in 1969 and it's worth a watch because he's bloody good and only 22. Nearly two decades later things weren't going quite so well for John and as everyone in the entertainment game knows, sometimes you have to take a shitty gig to pay the rent. John's shitty gi, gi, gi, gi, gi, gi, gi gi, gig was an advertisement for Gerard Roofs that pretty much gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, gu, guaranteed a whole ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, generation of Kiwi's were stuttering their G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G's for fuckin' age, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ge, ges.

I'm going to post John's Gerard Roofing advertisement below. Just a warning, once you've watched this the phone will ring and the little girl John's holding will try and sell you a roof.


In 80s NZ it was compulsory to watch a TV show on Sunday night called A Dog's Show where men whistled at dogs all called Blue and Gyp and the dogs made sheep go over bridges and sometimes John's ad would play halfway through and for 30 seconds every Kiwi was connected by some deeply spiritual happy hive mind and no one spoke. All you could hear was John g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g'ing from every house in the land and afterwards people couldn't quite remember what had happened but felt a bit better about the Muldoon g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, government.

This is a round about way of telling you I got the power by finishing my five with, "Go for G, G, G, G, G, G, G, G, Gregory, go for Gregory and your Chairman's looking good."

And by power I meant the power to give up one lunch time every week to sit in the library listening to class representatives blathering about how the Four Square outlines were too small, or the GutterBoards were too angular or the K-Bars were too hard. After six months some of these student reps started to grumble that nothing had been done about their concerns so I decided to distract them with first a school disco and second a school mascot competition.

The disco didn't go well, mainly because we couldn't afford a DJ so I did the job myself with the shitty stereo from the music room and my brother's cassette of Disco by The Pet Shop Boys. It's a bloody fantastic album but there's only so many times you can play the 12" version of 'Paninaro' before people get toey. So I needed the mascot competition to go off like distraction dynamite and it did. Over 30 mediocre designs poured in and the council spent weeks deciding on the five best to be presented to the school for a vote. This never happened because I lost all the entries but it didn't matter because by then everyone else had lost all interest.

I've confessed to this before and I'm thinking about it again as the National Government of New Zealand wraps up spending $26 million changing a flag 70% of New Zealander's can't be arsed changing. There's no good reason to change it. NZ hasn't become a recent republic and John Key and the Windsor's are thick as thieves. So I'm guessing Key's flag competition, like my mascot competition was a distraction and now it's time for John to lose all the entries quick smart and pretend it never happened. There'll probably be a few annoying people on Twitter asking annoying questions but in a few weeks the All Blacks will be in the World Cup finals and Lorde's new album might drop and then we'll all say goodbye to Dan Carter and watch the Melbourne Cup and shit, then it's Christmas isn't it and before you know it John Key's won a 4th term and we're all feeling g, g, g, g, g, g, g, g, great!

Ice cream of Hosky

On 9 April I wrote a post about a man called Mike, tweeted I'd done so and that was that. By April 10 that post had received about 40 views, and at least five of those were mine as I corrected a few typos and checked to see if anyone had checked the 'daschund' box at the bottom....why's that red line underneath daschund? Oh shitballs. I've spelt it wrong. My blog's been in sporadic operation since 23 June 2009 so that means I've had the same spelling mistake on my blog for 2123 bloody days. And it's not just a little typo either, the 's' is in completely the wrong place and there's one whole 'h' missing in action. 'Daschund' doesn't even sound like dachshund. I've just found out 'schund' is German for 'trash' and 'da' is German for 'as', so for 2123 days I've been unwittingly inviting readers to mark my posts as German trash instead of a German short-legged long bodied dog. The difference is massive and mortifying.

Daschund

Dachshund

This is almost as embarrassing as finding out after a million performances of my show Heroic Faun No. One to ten people, a faun was half human-half goat and not half human-half deer. I'd based my whole damn performance in 'The Lion...yada yada Wardrobe' on a deer which probably explains why I was hardly ever in shot. Andrew Adamson seems like a nice guy, but I bet he was there watching the dailies at nightlies screaming, "Why is that fucking faun acting like a fucking deer?!" They didn't ask me back for 'Whoops I've Lost My Lion!' or 'Banarniarama 3' and now I know why. I did one final performance of Heroic Faun as a goat and got big laughs. Afterwards I went home, had big cries, set fire to my green tights and bent my rubber sword in two. I was not an actor. I was a faun fraud. A fraund.

None of this is what I wanted to write about today though. On 11 April I wrote another post that hardly anyone read and then on 14 April I noticed my post about Mike had been viewed 1100 times. And every time I refreshed it was going up, fast, even faster than the value of a Hosking-house. In a few hours it had overtaken by previous most popular post about Trey Songz and I had no idea why. My tweet had been retweeted by some lovely people which was lovely, but it still didn't explain why my little blog was going a little viral for a little while. An old friend who's worked in advertising since before Mad Men told me how marketing executives would crash into meetings all bursting and bug-eyed yelling, 'I need a viral! Just one viral man! C'mon, don't hold out on me, I know you got a viral there somewhere, I'll give you anything you want....gotta....go...VIRAL!', before collapsing to the carpet to furiously tap their inner elbow with an iPhone. Going viral for the wrong reasons is easy, all you have to do is be racist on public transport or Woolworths, but going viral in a good way is like herding haystacks into a bottle of lightning with a cat, it's very tricky. Luckily the primary cause of my viralness was eventually revealed to me by another old friend Susan who sent me this screen grab.

Thanks Susan!

This is the Facebook page of Taiki Waititi and he's got a lot of followers thanks to acting, writing and directing hit TV shows and films like Flight of the Conchords, Boy and What We Do In The Shadows. 'Remtentacles' seemed to strike a major chord with Taika which is nice. Unfortunately it struck a minor chord with one Andrew James who decided I was a "tiresome old bolshevik" who should be put against a wall and shot like the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu. Crikey! Andrew sums up my post with the phrase, "It's not fair he's got a bigger ice cream than me it's not fair." And I think we all know by 'ice-cream' Andrew really means 'penis', and yes he's spot on, my whole rant was actually about being insanely jealous of the huge Paddlepop in Hosky's pants right-wing New Zealand can't wait to wrap their laughing gear round.

But all good viruses must come to an end, unless you don't vaccinate, and my little Hoskovirus is no exception. Now all I have left to remember it by are 45 comments and thank you to those who took the time to do so, especially this anonymous contributor who put me in my place and gave my noggin a good boppin' for poppin' my head out of my hole...

You summed it pretty well. You do not own a house.
So either you are just starting out (and know nothing) or you are spending your money on today's pleasures and not going without like all the house owners have done. That puts you into the hole you want to put all others into.

Of course! It's all black and white and blue all over. Young people don't know anything. All house owners have gone without and if you don't own a house it's your own fault because you've frittered all your money on today's pleasures like food and rent and shit like that.  But not any more. Google tells me I've creamed $8.54AU ($8.67NZ...PARITY!) thanks to Mike Hosking and every cent of this will go towards buying a house. The average house price in Auckland is about $711 000, so watch out Hosky, I'll be popping over to ask for an ice cream before you know it.

Mostly Harmless

I had a moment yesterday dashing across Smith Street to avoid a chugger and realised if I was hit by the 86 tram while avoiding a smiling Englishman with a clipboard, my last blog post would be about Mike Hosking. That made me feel sad. There was another chugger on the other side of Smith Street so my dash of death was a pointless one and that made me feel sad. The chugger outside Woolies felt sad as I avoided his gaze and dashed inside to buy something I didn't need. That was too much sadness for me to bear so I decided to write a post about something that made me happy. And here it is.

Squeeeeeeee!

This is a computer. But not just any computer. This is a BBC Model B computer. Back before the BBC was a puppet with Jeremy Clarkson's hand up its bum, they made educational programmes like this one, and for one programme about computers called by someone very clever 'The Computer Programme', they hired a company called Acorn Computers, no relation to Apple, to build a computer for the presenters to pretend they knew how to program. Thus the greatest computer the world has ever seen was born. I just read the BBC Model B also featured in a show in Catalonia called, 'Connecta el micro, pica l'start!' (exclamation mark and italics added by me to enhance Spanishness), and surely this is the greatest computer programme show title the world has ever seen.

I never owned a BBC Model B but my brother did...I think I've sort of written about this before...one moment...yes I have, here. Anyway, my brother used the BBC to learn how to code and now travels the globe fighting crime with a big 'W' on his chest. I used the BBC to play games and spent the next 20 years dressing up as animals for children. The BBC had lots of great games, but one was greater than the sum of all the others, and it's name was Elite. OMG. Even typing the name makes me feel all wobbly and my fingers involuntary settle on the keys A, S, X, <, > and ? I'd better calm down and find a picture for you so you can see what I'm all juiced up about.

Squeeeeee!

OMG! OMG! Look at that. That's a Cobra MkIII, and maybe a Cobra MkI, and I think two Mambas all looking to dock in a Coriolis space station. All the ships were named after snakes. How cool is that? Now, if you think this game looks pretty damn awesome from the cover of the the box, wait until you see a screenshot of the real thing.

Squeeeeee!

That's what it looks like when you're about to dock in a Coriolis. Look at the beautiful white lines. Elite was all white lines. In fact I suspect Grandmaster Flash wrote his hit 'White Lines' while playing Elite. I'll see if I can find a picture of the opening screen to really blow your mind.

Squeeeee!

I know, I know. It's amazing. That's a Cobra MkIII and it rotated forever unless you pressed 'Y' or 'N'. Sometimes when Dean was out playing soccer or something, (I played for one season but was shit and I think even the Nomads 13F's were pleased to see the back of me), I could watch the Cobra spin for hours, almost crying with the majestic pallid beauty of it. What made it even more special was this was the ship you flew and no matter if you pressed 'Y' or 'N' you got to fly it...for a fucking long time, or at least until Dean came home and kicked me out of his room. The colourful box at the bottom is your flight control screen and I can still tell you what it all means without cheating by using Phone-A-Google and I know you don't care but I'm going to right now!

FS - Forward Shield
AS - Aft Shield
FU - Fuel
CT - Cabin Temperature
LT - Laser Temperature
AL - What you can call me
SP - Suppressive Person
RL - Rod Latham
DD - Smash
1,2,3 - Testing Testing

It's amazing how it all comes back. Elite was a LONG game. It was the test match cricket of the gaming world and you could play for five days solid and still come away with no result. But what a journey to nothingness it was. The gameplay went like this. I'll post another screenshot to help out.

Squeeeee!

Those blobs are all planets and their names are embedded in my subconscious like stones in a sock. At each of these planets you could buy exciting things like, 'Food', 'Alloys' and 'Textiles'. You would then travel to another planet, not Riedquat though as from memory that was an Anarchy planet and a West African Brown Spitter was sure to take you out, and then sell your 'Food', 'Alloys' and 'Textiles'. But here's the thing, if you were lucky you could sell them for a SMALL PROFIT! And after months of diligent trading you could buy a 'Fuel Scoop' or a 'Large Cargo Bay' or if you were very lazy a 'Docking Computer'.

While supplying the universe with textiles you could also advance your combat ranking from 'Harmless' to 'Elite'. The first few ranks were easy peasy, all you had to do was nobble an Oxacan Smallheaded Rattler and boom, you were 'Mostly Harmless' before you knew it. But it got harder. Much harder. The final step from 'Deadly' to 'Elite' took forever. You had to kill something like 20,000 Namib Dwarf Sanders and after every thousand or so this is what happened.

This is a C64 screenshot so no Squeeee!

After playing non-stop for days those three little words were your only reward. Even when you finally became Elite that was all you got. Sometimes, if I played for long enough without sleep the words could look like 'REDRUM ON COMMANDER!', or 'RIGHT ON MARIJUNA!' or 'I LOVE YOU GREG!', but that was the beauty of Elite, it taught you about life. You give up months or years to focus on one objective and when you finally reach it there's absolutely no reward. Nobody gives a shit. Just like life. No cut-screens, no secret revelations, not even a Stephen Hawking voice to congratulate you, and I knew the BBC could do that because the game Citadel started with Stephen Hawking saying, "Citadel! Citadel! Citadel! Citadel! Superior Software presents....Citadel." Not a reward sausage. Just a 'RIGHT ON COMMANDER!' I've heard tragic tales of players who became Elite and went on playing for years before they checked their status to realise they were Elite.

And guess what?

Squeeeeee!

It is happening again.

A Rant About Mike Hosking

Some people move to Australia for work, some move for the sunshine and some move because they like to be near creatures that can poison or eat them, however my sole reason for moving to Australia was to get away from this man.

Hai ladies!

His name is Mike Hosking. If you're not from New Zealand you'll have no idea who he is and should consider yourself bloody lucky. He's one of those middle-aged, boorish, self-righteous, right-wing blow-hards you find blowing themselves hard on multiple media platforms in most Western countries, think a pinch of Jeremy Clarkson, with a smattering of Sean Hannity and a prick of Piers Morgan. Mike is everywhere in NZ. And I mean EVERYWHERE. Most outsiders think New Zealand is nothing but sheep and Hobbits but it's not, it's nothing but sheep and Hosking, although now most of the sheep have fucked off to be replaced by gaseous cows busy shitting in rivers, so New Zealand is nothing but cows and Hosking, Hosking and cows, farting and shitting as far as the ear can hear and the eye can see. You know in the movie of the book by Orwell starring Hurt and Hurt only has one tele that he can't turn off and every time he looks at it there's this big face telling him what to think and do... in NZ that face is Mike Hosking. Mike knows everything about everything and he's not afraid to tell you all about it all the time on television, radio, newspaper, Twitter and there is no escape, there is only submission and subservience to the Hosking juggernaut. I was terrified he'll suddenly turn up on TV over here but after the one million dollar Paul Henry Channel 10 fiasco I foolishly believed I could remain unexposed to his radioactive right-wing field of crap.

But the internet put an end to that. This morning I clicked on the NZ Herald app and for some reason the first headline that appeared was 'House Prices Represent Success In Life'. That sounds like the headline to a witty piece of satire I thought and being game for an early morning chuckle I clicked on it and Mike won. Mike found me, he knows where I am and I haven't got the energy to run anymore. His Remtentacles ('Rem is Mike-speak for Remuera where Mike lives and tentacles are what Mike has instead of arms), reached out through my smartphone screen and coated my eyes with a smeary smarmy army of Hoskingisms.

"What the house prices represent is not dissimilar to what the dollar represents: success."

"Success is the outworking of demand."

"The dollar is on a roll, housing is on a roll, we're on a roll. These are golden days."

So in Mike's world, a housing bubble making it virtually impossible for first home buyers to buy and a high exchange rate to discourage NZ exporters, foreign tourists and contribute to a trade deficit means golden days, probably because Mike is pissing all over us as he delivers another sermon on the mount. Only yesterday a principal economist from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research declared the Auckland housing bubble to be the equivalent of a ponzi scheme, but he's only got an Honours degree in Economics so what the hell does he know. Mike left school when he was 16 and lives in the real world and the economist is renting! Renting! What a loser!

As well as being excited about a housing bubble and the Kiwi dollar nearing parity with the Oz dollar, (one can imagine Mike ringing random Australian phone numbers late at night with his designer jeans round his ankles to gleefully scream "Parity!" at the poor unfortunate who answers before hanging up to finish Hosking himself off), Mike is exploding with the belief that NZ has Australia by the, "short and curlies". 'It's over!" screams Mike. Pick any indicator, left, right, hazard lights, Australia are rooted! Australia is over a barrel and Mike is right behind ready to give it a bloody good seeing-to with his mighty currency. 

But, here's the thing. I live in Australia, and the truth is Australia couldn't give a shit about NZ's currency. The NZ dollar doesn't even make it on screen during the financial bit of the news over here. Bluntly, we need them a hell of a lot more than they need us. I'm no fan of Don Brash, but he knows a thing or two about economics and here's what he said in 2007...

"There would be nothing remotely attractive about having closed the gap to Australia [by its economy declining] - as our largest trading partner and largest source of inward foreign investment, Australia's success matters greatly to us."

Yes, the Aussie economy is going through a downturn, but that's largely due to an oversupply of iron ore and an oversupply of Tony Abbott, but both of these will come to an end, hopefully one much sooner than the other. Melbourne is growing by around 250 people every day. There are eight apartment buildings going up within a few blocks of where I live. One is probably large enough to accommodate Ashburton. New Zealand is an amazing place, full of incredible people and businesses doing incredible things, but to say we've, "nailed it" because we almost reached parity makes no sense no matter how many cents our dollar is worth. 

Boo! Hiss! What a party pooper Cooper! Let's hear some more from the Hosker...

"This little nation of four and a half million produces a dollar that is at least as appealing as that monstrous land to our left. "

Ah, the old per-capita/small population gambit, used since the dawn of time to make us feel better about only winning one gold, two silver and seven bronze medals. Yes, the NZ economy is doing well, but I suspect its official cash rate of 3.5% compared to Australia's rate of 2.25% and dropping may have something to do with our sexy come hither dollar being so irresistible. I got a C+ in first year economics and 88% in my audio engineering diploma so I know about these things.

But I don't own a house. Mike owns a house. Maybe two. Maybe more. And now it's cheaper for him to pop over to Melbourne to buy his Ksubi jeans so we're all good and golden bro. Who gives a toss that the level of child poverty in Godzone has doubled since 1983 with around 280,000 kids going to school hungry and who cares that the top 1% of adults own three time's as much of the country's wealth as the entire lower half put together, success is measured by the value of your house and the value of your dollar.

And if you haven't got your hands on either, tough luck.

Every Which Way But Puce

Bloody Bono. He flies off his bike in Central Park, breaking numerous bonos bones in his body and face and still has the work ethic to write a 6000 word 'Little Book of A Big Year: Bono's A to Z of 2014'. Most people would be satisfied with feeling sorry for yourself while scoffing morphine jelly but not Bono, he writes a little book, plus a few songs and probably most of a Spiderman II musical.

I've just finished reading Bono's little book and it's quite good. He says at the start, "you shouldn't have time to read this," but unlike Bono I am a high level procrastinator who can always find time to fit 6000 words of delay into my day. After I finished I felt guilty. Twice. First because I'd spent half an hour reading Bono's 6000 words when I should have been typing six of my own and second, even though Bono had every excuse in the world not to write, he wrote. He wrote lots. And if Bono can write a little book while the blood of Irish virgins is being pumped into him, the least I can do is write a blog post.

Bono's little book is a bit like those group letters people used to send around Christmas 30 years ago when Bono was screaming, "Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you!" They usually had a hand-written salutation and maybe a wee written message at the bottom like 'Hope you have a great year but not as great as mine,' and in-between there were two pages of photocopied text telling people they hardly knew about all the amazing bloody things they achieved over the year and all the amazing bloody places they visited and how bloody clever their kids were and how bloody proud they were of all the amazing bloody things their bloody kids bloody achieved over the year and how bloody much they love bloody Apple and Jimmy Kimmel and Kanye West. Chain-letters were essentially a periodic analogue version of Facebook, which I'm not on anymore, just in case any of you have the hump with me thinking I've de-friended you. I haven't de-friended you, I've de-friended the world.

The cat is meowing at me. One moment...

Poor thing. It's 36 degrees at the moment (96.8 for North American readers), and she's all hot and bothered. Possibly. It could also be a subtle ruse to get early tuna and if that's the case she's played me like a fishy fiddle. She's got her own evaporative cooler in her room so I suspect she's just trying it on. Her evaporative cooler is cool and looks a bit like a 70's Dr. Who villain.

Evaporate! Evaporate!

Anyway, I gave Facebook the old heave-ho a few months ago and haven't missed it a jot. Except on my birthday when Facebook didn't tell people it was my birthday and nobody knew it was my birthday and nobody sent me a message on Facebook to wish me happy birthday. If Facebook had a function where it could remain dormant like a volcano and suddenly come to life for one day every year to spew hot molten messages of birthday love at my face before going to sleep again I may still be on it. If anyone reading knows Mark Zuckerberg they should have a word to him. Not that anybody will be reading as now I can't promote my blog on Facebook.

I don't do new year's resolutions but if I did I'd resolve to write two blog posts a week for all of 2015. I'd also resolve to get my legs tanned by natural means. I went swimming in Chiltern on Xmas day in nothing but boxers, borrowed shorts and water, and two days later my milky white skin woke up like a volcano and spewed hot molten messages of itchy red rash everywhere. Polymorphous Light Eruption or PMLE possibly. They've settled down now to a delicate shade of puce. It will mean the end of the official 'Greg Cooper Comedy Legs (c) 1973' and God knows, those legs saved me during many hell mingles and gigs, but I'm ready to move on. I am more than my white legs. I am a puce man. I am a puce man. I am the walrus.