Monthly Archives: April 2009

Frequently Arksed Questions

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People get to my website by googling questions they need answers for. As my blog currently can’t provide these answers, I have taken the liberty of answering some of the more popular ones.

What rhymes with Robyn?

Dave Dobbyn.

What to say as weeding MC?

Something about a ho.

What does Buffalo Stance mean?

Let’s start with Buffalo. The Face magazine described it as…

a look an attitude, a gang; a creative collection of photographers, designers, hair stylists, pop stars and models – Marc and James Lebon, Jamie Morgan, Nick and Barry Kamen, Judy Blame, Neneh Cherry, and Mitzi Lorenz, among others – working around the creative hub of superstylist Ray Petri.

Right, so Neneh Cherry’s boyfriend was Cameron McVey, and he was in a pop duo called Morgan-McVey with the above mentioned Jamie Morgan. They had a Stock-Atkin-Waterman produced single called “Looking Good Diving”, which was released with a b-side remix called “Looking Good Diving with the Wild Bunch”. This involved the instrumental track from the song remixed by the Wild Bunch with Cameron’s girlfriend rapping over the top about the Buffalo scene, pimp, prostitutes, gigolos and how she ain’t going for that flashy shit and was in it for the long haul.

When Neneh Cherry came to release her solo album a year or so later, she rerecorded the song as “Buffalo Stance”, and gave it a bit more attitude. Uh. And a motherfucking breakbeat. Yeah. DJ. Tell it like it is.

What does it mean when they say a participle dangles?

If you see that your friends participle is dangling, you should discretely insert a subject or some punctuation to help clarify things.

What happened to Peter Urlich?

FluFFFy1: So, Peter Urlich of Th’ Dudes and Nice ‘n’ Urlich and TrueBliss fame.
Watkins2000: Who?
FluFFFy1: The lead singer of late ’80s pop/funk act B Cup?
Watkins2000: Oh, that guy.
FluFFFy1: So what’s he up to these days?
Watkins2000: Dunno. He doesn’t do breakfast on George FM any more.
FluFFFy1: He went through that swing singing phase last year. That was pretty choice.
Watkins2000: I liked that. I mean, I *really* like that. He kept it real.
FluFFFy1: Yeah, kia kaha, Peter Urlich.
Watkins2000: Kia kaha.

What to do you to paper mache if it starts to go mouldy?

Ok, first you need to tell it to stop going mouldy. If that doesn’t work you could try yelling at it or hitting it. If that still doesn’t work, tell it you are sorry and you love it and buy it a chocolate bar such as Cadbury Fruit and Nut. That should do the trick. If you have any further problems, put it in the hot water cupboard for a few days.

How many people went to beach last year?

OMG, there were so many people there I almost lost count! Muffy was there and Chad was there and Suzie was there and all the kids from the Bellevue came down and brought matching towels. And we all started to do the starfish dance. It’s so easy to do! Shake it like a starfish! There was soda pop and hotdogs and someone even brought cookies! You should have been there. It was ace! Twelve in total.

How do you pronounce Ngunguru?

En-gun-guru.

Why do New Caledonia people speak French?

They originally learned it at high school and then went on an AFS exchange to Montreal when they were 17 and came home wearing a beret and swearing at their mum in French. Then when they were working in London on their OE, they went over to Paris for a few weeks and had such a good time that when they came back to New Caledonia they decided they’d just keep speaking French and it’s pretty much stuck ever since.

Who is the MC who use a straw to sing?

I don’t know, but he must really suck.

Why is Robyn wearing my shoes and why is Facebook not working?

Ok, first of all? They’re not your shoes. I mean, I know I took them from your bedroom but that was only because you spilt that jug full of margaritas in my shoes and I couldn’t go to work with wet shoes.

And Facebook is working. It’s just blocked for you because the internet doesn’t work for people who go around spilling drinks in people’s shoes.

Why’s the shed locked?

Look, if you want your combine harvester back, you should just ask. I’ll go and get it for you. I only locked the shed to keep it secure. I wasn’t trying to steal it or anything. What would I want with a combine harvester, any way. Oh, by the way, if you see someone selling a combine harvester on Trade Me and it looks a bit like yours, it’s not. It’s just a coincidence and the auction will probably get taken down soon anyway.

How does a dance card work?

  1. Go to a retailer and load a cash value onto your dance card (minimum $10; 25c loading fee).
  2. Go to dance, remembering to swipe your dance card at the door.
  3. Dance.
  4. When dance is complete, swipe your dance card on a card reader and dance amount will be deducted.
  5. Please note: GST not included.
  6. Also note: R&B slowjam incurs 2.5% service charge.
  7. I like it when your butt goes ba-donk-a-donk-donk.

Will the train leave at 5 on Fridays?

No, you’ll need to get there 10 to 15 minutes before or after. Also remember there are Super Saver Saturdays starting next month, so maybe you can postpone.

How come chimpanzees act like little kids?

Because apparently the chimpanzees don’t have the basic human right which says in law that they are allowed to use a firm smack as part of corrective punishment in good parenting, so they grow up undisciplined and watching trash television such as “Baywatch” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “The Shogun Miniseries” and so they act like little kids and don’t even go to university and just sit around all day eating carrots and throwing straw at each other. You can’t even dress them up as aristocrats any more and make them have tea parties because apparently it’s “politically incorrect” and “cruel” and “impairs their development”. And they call this progress.

What are the events that happended in the 10 years before I was born in 1989?

1979 – Mr Ed horse dies :(
1980 – Reagan’s president elect. Good-time dancin’ stopped.
1981 – Couples For Christ is established in the Philippines.
1982 – Little Prince William is born! A blonde manchild who one day will become king! Maybe I will be his queen!!!!!
1983 – The McNugget was born.
1984 – Muldoon got on the nyak and was like “YO WE IZ GOING 2 DA POLLZ”. Lost.
1985 – Bob Geldof runs a charity fund-raiser fair.
1986 – Aw shit – Space Shuttle Challenger blew up and everyone on it died :(
1987 – Stock market crashes; Prozac introduced; modern life declared rubbish.
1988 – Expo ’88 showcased the best of the world in Brisbane, QLD.

Does weed make you infertile?

Think about it, man. The good Lord put the herb on earth for man to smoke. And man and woman have been toking on the sweet sweet mary jane for centuries. And the man and the woman, they have babies. So does the weed make you infertile, the answer is no, brotherman. No, it ain’t.

What do you need to be a cruise ship captain?

  • A motivated self-starter with people skills.
  • Degree in cruise ship captaining from Southland Polytech.
  • One of those captain hats.
  • Teenage daughter who has cocaine problem.
  • Private cabin for captaining the sexy divorcees who come aboard.
  • Comedy eyepatch and plastic wooden leg kit.
  • Must have respect for colourful Irish underclasses singing gaily in steerage.
  • A boat.
  • Ye not be no landlubber.
  • Must like: buffet dining; shuffleboard; PINA COLADAS!!!!!
  • Must also like mermaids but not be averse to mermans. It can get lonely at sea.
  • Applications in “writing” plz.

What is dorky about yourself?

See above.

We don’t need your fascist ’80s retro pop thing

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I went dancin’ last night at the Atomic evening at the San Francisco Bath House. Atomic is centred around music from the 1980s, but certainly not what has come to be considered ’80s Music.

That is to say, it’s not about those “retro” “classics” like “Come on Eileen” or “Venus” or “Karma Chameleon” or “I’m So Excited” or “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Those were the kind of songs that I listened to and enjoyed when I was a child in the ’80s.

Atomic’s about the sort of music that I didn’t enjoy when I was a girl, usually because it dealt with adult themes and wasn’t cheerful and upbeat.

Case in point – New Order’s “Blue Monday” was a massive hit in New Zealand in 1983, but as an 8-year-old, I wasn’t having any of it. “I see a shit in the harbour” – is that how it went? Wot a dumb lyric. And why did “Ready to Roll” have to keep playing it all the time?

Nowadays, however, I get “Blue Monday”. “Tell me how does it feel when your heart grows cold”. Yeah, I get that.

Just as well, I reckon. I mean, it would have been somewhat weird for me, aged 5, to be enjoying “Fade To Grey” instead of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”.

But the DJ at Atomic did throw in a few of those songs I listened to in the ’80s – “Tainted Love”, “99 Luftballons”, “White Wedding” – and I couldn’t really enjoy them. It was like the music equivalent of playing with dolls or eating fairy bread. It’s something that I associate so strongly with my childhood that I can’t enjoy it as an adult.

If I’m having a kanikani on the dancefloor, I don’t want to keep being transported back to the 1980s, to primary school and awkwardness and Matangi and two TV channels and mind-numbing boredom. But I could understand that for some people, the past is infinitely preferable to the present or the future, so they would probably want to be reminded of their warm, safe childhood in the ’80s.

It’s really enjoyable exploring old music that I’ve only discovered recently. It doesn’t come with feelings of nostalgia or longing for some distant, rose-tinted memory. As cheesy as “Temptation” is, it is dealing with universal human themes (you know, being tempted) that didn’t expire in the ’80s.

The ’90s, however, oh, that’s a whole different post.

Every day is like Easter Sunday

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I was thinking about Easter Sunday, and how most of the shops are shut and there’s nothing much to do. And I wondered what I’d done on previous Easter Sundays.

So invoking the Official Information Act, I pulled out my box of old diaries from under my bed and googled them with my eyes, to bring you this exclusive report, starting in 1992 when I was 18:

Things I have done on previous Easter Sundays

1992: Crank-called that lady with the eyebrows; went to Auckland Zoo.

1993: Totally sick of my parents treating me like a child! Watched “Clue” on video.

1994: Felt a bit sick.

1995: Drove back from Lang’s Beach. Watched “Say Anything” on video.

1996: Vowed to save logs from IRC to create a “cyber My Secret Garden”.

1997: Saw “Jerry Maguire” at the movies. Thought it was ok but not as great as the hype suggested.

1998: Hung out with a fellow sporting George Michael facial hair (gay!), listened to Gene Pitney (gay!) and the Verlaines (not gay).

1999: Ate burgers at Milford Beach with a nice boy.

2000: Slept for most of the day. Wondered what hot yoghurt would taste like.

2001: Had a really bad bagel.

2002: Wondered if it was ethical to only hang out with someone when he was drunk because he was more fun drunk than when he was sober; embroidered.

2003: Read Andrew Dean’s review of the previous night’s Sly and Robbie concert – like a 2 1/2 hour blowjob, he reckoned.

2004: Was plagued by sneezing, but couldn’t get any antihistamines or aloe vera tissues as the shops were shut.

2005: Saw “I Heart Huckerbees”. Liked that bit in the mud with Schwartzman.

2006: Came up with a concept for a television programme: Bargain Cunt, where wankers buy second homes, building their cunting property investment portfolios. Discovered someone else had already thought of it, sans swearing.

2007: Thought I’d discovered a fixed outcome of a popular reality TV show, only to discover it was just a dummy script.

2008: Did some packing. Took my postcards down from the lounge room wall.

2009: Watched the Doctor Who special. Noted that Wellington on Easter Sunday felt like Hamilton on any Sunday in the ’80s. Wanted to watch “Say Anything” but the iTunes Store didn’t have it, so I watched “Tropic Thunder” instead.

The only conclusion I can make from the above is that Easter Sunday brings out an urge in me to watch Cameron Crowe films.

Horseboy revisited

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Regular readers may remember my post about when, in 1995, I emailed TV2′s late-night news programme Newsnight with a poem about Horseboy, the show’s mascot hobby horse. Marcus Lush read it out on air, making it one of the first viewer emails to be shown on New Zealand television. Or something like that.

Well, recently I had a chance to view that episode. It was pretty much how I remembered it (I’m sure I had video-recorded it and watched it a few times back in the day), and now I’ve taken a few screen shots and added it to the post.

Actually, let’s just pause for some lolz. Here’s a screen shot from that same episode of the Absolut CHOGM map – when Newsnight realised that route of the motorcade security loop in Auckland for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting looked like a wonky Absolut vodka bottle:

absolutechogm

But anyway, watching that old episode of Newsnight – and a few others from late 1995 – it was really interesting to see how they treated that crazy new “internet” thing.

In another episode, Newsnight looked at Auckland art dealers Fox Gallery who had built a website to showcase their art. The interview was filmed at the physical gallery and much of the footage was of actual art on the walls, not online. (Though there were a few crappy shots of the gallery’s website, shown on crusty old Netscape.)

At the end of the story, the URL was shown on screen for interested parties to jot down. It was – steady yourself – http://www.ecentral.co.nz/fox.gallery/fox.welcome.html

Srsly. Remember when URLs used to be like that?

I just googled Fox Gallery to see if it still existed. It doesn’t seem to, but the search results brought up heaps of other Auckland galleries. These days it’s completely unremarkable for a gallery to have a website.

Now, when Fox’s 54-character URL was up on screen, Marcus Lush realised the graphic would actually need to stay up there for a while to give people a decent chance to write it down. So he ad-libbed, saying, “They say the trouble with the internet is that no one’s ever found a use for it. There’s nothing to do.”

And, yeah, that’s almost what it was like back then. There was no Trade Me, no Facebook, no Google. I’d only been online for a few months and while I was thrilled by the obvious potential of the internet, my first website will still about 8 months away and I was still trying to figure out what to do with the internet.

So now maybe the general internet has got to the stage where it’s a bit ordinary and boring; and now if you buy a handbag on Trade Me or watch an old Flaming Lips video on YouTube, people don’t think you’re a “computer whizz” and expect you to be able to fix their PC.

Though there are still corners of the internet that haven’t wiggled into the mainstream yet. For example, as ubiquitous as Twitter may seem, it’s still really hard to explain it to people who haven’t used it; who don’t get why you’d use it, just as 15 years ago they wouldn’t have understood why an art gallery would have a webpage.

But eventually they figure it out.

The Cricket

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1984, the playing field of Matangi School, Waikato. My class was playing cricket for PE. (Ugh, I hate PE!) and I was doing that thing with throwing the ball. What’s it called? Oh yeah, bowling. And I threw the ball at my classmate who was holding the bat and somehow I did something good, a sophisticated move in the world of cricket. And then I did it again. Yet I didn’t actually know what I did that was so great. “Whoa, watch out for Robyn – she’s good,” my teacher said. So I bowled again, attempting to replicate my killer move, but just ended up hurtling the ball vaguely in the direction of the batter (which, I swear, is all I’d done the first couple of times) but this time it was a bad bowl and I was never able to replicate my supposed quite-good bowling technique.

1996, Mike’s flat, Hillcrest, Hamilton. I was hanging out with Mike and he was talking about cricket, particularly some young whippersnapper from around the way named Daniel Batory or something. I was getting bit sick of all the cricket talk so I sang my cricket song. It’s a bit like 10CC’s “Dreadlock Holiday“, and it goes like this: I don’t like cricket / Oh no. And that’s the end of the song. Many people have heard me sing this song over the years.

2009, the Basin Reserve, Wellington. So, I’m sitting up on the grass at the Basin Reserve watching New Zealand and India play a test match cricket game thing. I’m sitting with Hadyn (who writes about sport), Richard (who also writes about sport), Dan (who writes about movies, but has a season pass to the cricket) and various other people who actually know what’s going on.

Run, run, run!

Despite my general view of cricket as an annoying, confusing game, I’d decided to come along just to see if it was really as annoying and confusing as I thought.

For a start, I didn’t really know what was going on, so I asked questions such as:

They’re all wearing white – how do you tell which team is batting and which team is fielding?

You look at the scoreboard thing and it tells you. Also, the New Zealand team have wider stripes on their uniform.

Where do the non-batting players go when they’re not batting?

There’s a lean-to tiki shack thing next to the main grandstand. They go and hang out there and make toasted sandwiches.

What’s an over?

A unit of something cricket related? Um, I can’t actually remember, but Dan did explain it quite well at the time.

So, um, when does it end today? Because I know the game thing goes over multiple days, and it’s all a bit complicated with the runs and overs and shit, but I was just wondering when there was an approximate time for it to end because, well, it’s getting a bit cold and windy up here.

Soon, little Smurf. Soon.

I slowly began to piece together the basics of the game, and learned about the strategic move where India could have made New Zealand bat again. (Or was it field again?)

At one stage Chris Martin was batting. This is not the same Chris Martin from Coldplay who is married to Gwyneth Paltrow (lolz!!!). Not that I could tell, given that he was a distant white-clad figure. Apparently Mr Martin is not typically an awesome batter, but he managed to hit a four (what?) which is quite good and everyone yelled and cheered.

Mate 

After a while I realised that going to a cricket game isn’t necessarily about the sport. It’s more like going on a picnic with your mates, but with the option of being entertained by some fellows in white woollen vests running around in the distance.

And that is something I don’t mind at all.