Hobbits

Ugh. Are we doing this again? Really? REALLY?

New Zealanders in the UK

Here at UUJM, if there's one thing we hate, it's people doing boring things. But if there's one thing we hate even more, it's people doing boring things under the auspices of them being interesting. If you're in the mid to late twenties age bracket then a profound case in point is the "great Kiwi OE", which is painfully shoved in our face every time we log onto Facebook. The "great Kiwi OE", which for those lucky enough to be unfamiliar typically involves a 2 year trip to live in the United Kingdom, is unfortunately neither great nor much of an overseas experience. Much like New Zealand migration to Australia, the "great Kiwi OE" seems to primarily be a way for New Zealand to export its idiots to a country with some general sympathy towards us based on historical ties and the desire for an underclass of cheap labour.

For those taking the trip, our point here is: isn't there a sharp irony about seeking to experience the immense cultural diversity the world has to offer by travelling to the single most culturally and politically similar country to New Zealand in the whole world? You know, the one from whom we inherited our language, political system, social structure and, yes, even our national sport? And isn't there a similar irony about treating a Facebook photo of yourself in a different European destination (usually drunk and on a Top Deck tour) as proof that you have engaged with the history, culture and people of a particular country in a meaningful way?

Predictably, things only get worse once said idiot arrives at Heathrow (wearing their All Blacks jersey). Although undoubtedly one of the world's greatest cities, most ex-patriate New Zealander's first port of call in London is the Shepherds Bush Walkabout, where they can experience all the diversity the city has to offer by getting blindly drunk most days of the week with a rowdy mob of similarly minded people from Australia and South Africa. Going there has the added bonus of providing a great opporunity to catch up with heaps of people from home who you haven't seen in years! Which, after all, was the point of the exercise wasn't it? Then there was the epic drunken haka that we all performed at 2am- I mean being here makes you appreciate how truely multicultural us Nu Zillanders are!

Having shaken off the hangover, it must now be time to experience the many sights and rich cultural and historical heritage of London. First stop, Buckingham Palace. Better get a photo for Facebook, because no-one will have seen a photo of that before. Second stop, the London Eye. Better get a photo here too. Tower Bridge? The Gherkin? The River Thames? Brighton Pier? Why not. There I was on the whole other side of the world, but I was like totally representing Nu Zilland becuase I was wearing my All Blacks jersey!  Yeah, great move wearing your All Blacks jersey by the way, after all, everyone loves a tourist who blends in seamlessly with their surroundings. We love it when American tourists in New Zealand wear Hawaiian shirts and bum bags and make a point of telling everyone where they are from.

Right, London, tick. I'm pretty sure we've covered everything this grand city of culture and history has to offer. Definitely time to get out of England. I've booked a trip to France and Italy over the weekend, will definitely have to have the All Blacks jersey ready for that one. Pretty keen to get a photo of me wearing it in front of the Eiffel tower for Facebook, and maybe even a hilarious one of me looking like I am holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa! And my brilliance won't be lost on all the French and Italian locals who hang out at the souvenir shops because they'll recognise I'm from Nu Zilland!  It's so sad that I only could get a long weekend here, I really felt like I was immersing myself in the local culture in an organic way. I think I was even picking up a bit of the local language! I'm pretty sure "ca va" means choice.

Still, time is short, Sunday is a huge night back in Shepherds Bush!

The Eagles (band)

I've said before that I don't like taking down easy targets but fuck it, I haven't blogged in ages and I wanna warm my fingers up again by writing on a subject about which I care deeply. I hate The Eagles. I want you to hate them too.

Don Henley once got fired from a job at a post office because he couldn't push an envelope. If he hadn't become a fuckwit acting as a musician he would've made a lot of money painting lines in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING ROAD! Seriously, is there a bore MORing band in the world? I doubt it.

The Eagles took the country rock amalgamation that Neil Young had perfected and slaughtered it. I won't defend everything Neil Young has released but at his best, the emotion he can put into one note is enough to stop time. His raw style of production offers an honesty that should be a blueprint for any band to follow. The Eagles offer the world's most boring voices singing the world's most formulaic songs, produced and arranged to well and truly round off any sharp edges to leave only a blunt instrument that can be used to bash any idiot listener into further idiocy.

The tour de farce in their embarrassing back catalogue is surely Hotel California. Apparently this song lasts for just over six minutes. It feels like six years. Six years of nothing happening. Six years of lyrics that are just mystical enough to make you think you're getting into something real deep if you're a fucking moron. This monstrosity was only ever Stairway to Heaven's bastard cousin and STH lost all appeal when I HIT ADULTHOOD and (a) realised life is too short for self indulgent nonsense; and (b) stopped being impressed by guitarists with fast fingers. At least STH develops and - I can't believe I'm saying this - takes the listener on a journey from folk to hard rock. Fuck Hotel California. It's six years of fuckwit paedophiles holding instruments and masquerading as musicians without creating any tension to release and thereby proving they're oblivious to the tools of musicianship.

Perhaps the shade of grey The Eagles paint their sound is most visible when you have the misfortune of hearing an Eagles covers band. I imagine it goes like this: "Hi, we're Life in the Fast Lane. Let's rock and roll with our first tune, Take it Easy. We're gonna follow that with Peaceful, Easy Feeling."

Yep, that's quite some range you've got there. Slow and slower. Boring and more boring. Just enough formula to make the shitheads that lap up your bullshit think they're real clever for getting the gist. Well fuck them and fuck you.

The Eagles. You know they're on John Key's iPod.

The Eagles. They gave us Don Henley's solo career AND Joe Walsh's solo career.

The Eagles. They should be hunted until they're extinct.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

Friends. The one that could have been Joey if it had kept going long enough. As much as this grossly overrated zit on the face of the ‘90s was popular, it was also terrible. It has drawn criticism for being too white, too heterosexual, and too unbelievably good looking but my main beef is that it’s really fucking dumb.

Let’s look at the characters. Much like The Breakfast Club, the Friends crew have been type-cast into extremely limited boxes so any shithead watching at home can feel like they “get” it. Joey is simple. Phoebe is ditsy. Ross is a geek. Monica is clean. Chandler is sarcastic. Rachel makes up the numbers. Do you realise how easy it becomes to make jokes when everything is this stupid?

Most '90s sitcoms focused on banal, everyday, everyperson themes. But many of them have aged much more gracefully than Friends. Why is Seinfeld still marginally funny even though both it and Friends were products of the same era? It might have something to do with the fact that the situations Seinfeld's characters got tangled up in were absurd but just within the bounds of believability, and hence funny. Friends never travelled anywhere near the absurd, staying so far inside the bounds of believability that about the most interesting thing that happened in the average Friends episode is some joke about laundry, or those oh-so-annoying repetitive gags, like that one about the naked guy across the street. Other '90s shows had repetitive gags but they had the good sense to stop using them after a while. Friends revelled in the predictability of doing the opposite. Any time writers have an incentive to reach for those hacky tropes of sit-com-dom, you know you're watching a braodcast-quality turd.

Friends. The show that opened the door for Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. (And Two and a Half Men after that!)

Friends. One time they went to see Hootie and the Blowfish.

Friends. Seriously, David fucking Schwimmer?

Friends. People wearing paisley-fronted vests and getting away with it, not to mention those God-awful John Lennon sunglasses.

Friends. The last show on TV to have a serious actor wear a moustache (can you think of any more recent?) .

Friends. It guest-starred Bruce Willis for a time in a non-action role. But his character was always threatening to turn in to McClane!

Friends. Justifiably typecasting actors who have done absolutely nothing since.

Friends. I’m not writing those stupid dots between the letters again.

Queen (The Band)

Everyone in the world seems to like Queen except me. My friends like Queen. The guys I play music with like Queen. My co-editor, Shaun probably likes Queen. That’s fine. After all, I’m used to having the best taste in the room, not to mention being a real dick in suggesting my dust-collecting degree in classical music shows I know best about pop.

But, c’mon. Queen are shit. Their ubiquitous “Best Of” collections are the epitome of thoughtless normtrooperism. You might think you’re having a shared spiritual experience when singing ‘We Are the Champions’ after someone wins a rugby game but really you’ve just fallen into the trap of the thoughtlessly unoriginal and, frankly, you’re circling the drain at the bottom of the barrel. You’re probably one of those awful people who like, “anything with a good beat, really” and I hate those people.

I don’t doubt the technique or the pop sensibilities. Brian May has fast fingers. That'll always impress the easily impressed. Freddie Mercury had pipes, sure. Some of the lyrics are clever and most of the songs use, sarcastic OMFG, more than three chords. They’re catchy but so are herpes. So are the Fergie-inclusive Black Eyed Peas. So is all sorts of dreadful shit. The problem with Queen is that they are tasteless.

Mercury belonged on Broadway and someone should burn Broadway to the ground. That road is a place for rich people to waste money on tasteless, cheesy indulgences and act like Muppets while being slapped in the face by prima donnas holding a no-subtlety-exaggerate-everything stick. Mercury’s larger-than-life lifestyle fits perfectly into that mould, as does his awful no-subtlety-exaggerate-everything strutting and awful no-subtlety-exaggerate-everything singing.

Brian May is just as bad. He takes the raw sexual energy and magnificent technique of Jimmy Page and covers it in five awful layers of 80s production gloss. Not only is that not rock and roll – it’s ANTI-ROCK-AND-ROLL! Stop calling these guys a rock band. They are the musical equivalent of smearing lipstick all over your face – just a big, coked up, tastelessly presented mess and their self-indulgent shite is as over-produced as it is over-played.

No doubt by now someone has accused me of homophobia. To that I’d like to reply that not only am I an Amnesty International member (and frequent letter writer, email sender and petition signer) but also a former employee. You should all be AI members but no one likes a preacher so I’ll move on. I’m also a fan of REM, David Bowie, The Smiths and Cowboy Machine. I don’t give a shit if the people in my ears are gay, straight, bi or confused.

My problem with Queen is entirely one of musical taste. To reiterate, they are tasteless. Bohemian Rhapsody might have been funny when you were watching Wayne’s World as a twelve year old but it’s clearly time to stop pissing in the shallow end of music and move on.

Paul Holmes

Paul Holmes is shit. Shauny and I would tell you that ourselves but we have a policy of never writing anything we can "borrow". With that in mind, we're delighted to have Diane Revoluta on board to put the Jurassic journalist in his place after he wrote this awful piece of nonsense about Waitangi Day. What follows below is taken directly from Di's blog.

My rewrite of Paul Holmes’ article entitled ‘Waitangi Day a complete waste: It’s time to cancel our repugnant national holiday’, featured on the New Zealand Herald website, 11th February 2012.

Waitangi Day produced its usual hatred, rudeness, and violence against a clearly elected Prime Minister from a group of hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos who seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision. This enables them to blissfully continue to believe that New Zealand is the centre of the world, no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters.

In one small part of the country, people protested in a largely peaceful manner during a speech from the leader of a party that seeks to progress the economy in the short-term at the expense of our future generations’ interests in our land and assets – a man whose entire public persona is geared towards appeasing the white, middle-class New Zealander; and protested the fact we live in a country where the indigenous group of a nation can be labelled a group of ‘hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos’ in our leading newspaper. Also, I don’t know how to use the thesaurus function in Microsoft Word so I have used both hateful and hate-fuelled in immediate succession. Elsewhere, Waitangi Day produced its usual scattering of picnics, sleep-ins and celebrations of the birth of a nation, 172 years ago.

I’m over Waitangi Day. It is repugnant. It’s a ghastly affair. As I lie in bed on Waitangi morning, I know that later that evening, the news will show us irrational Maori ghastliness with spitting, smugness, self-righteousness and the usual neurotic Maori politics, in which some bizarre new wrong we’ve never thought about will be lying on the table.

I am a washed up, former TV presenter who was fired almost ten years ago but tries to cling to my D-grade celebrity status by writing a column for an even lower-brow news website. I use long strings of adjectives to reach my word count.

This, we will have to address and somehow apply these never-defined principles of the Treaty of Waitangi because it is, apparently, the next big resentment. There’ll be lengthy discussion, we’ll end up paying the usual millions into the hands of the Maori aristocracy and God knows where it’ll go from there. Well, it’s a bullshit day, Waitangi. It’s a day of lies. It is loony Maori fringe self-denial day. It’s a day when everything is addressed, except the real stuff.

As well as writing boring columns that no one would bother to read were it not for the curiosity of seeing just how low I will go in an attempt to make a comeback, I also consider myself quite the legal beagle. I have read the Court of Appeal judgement of New Zealand Māori Council v. Attorney-General but I consider myself to be a greater legal mind than former President of the Court of Appeal, Sir Robin Cooke, and therefore reject his widely-accepted interpretation of the Principles of the Treaty and will continue to refer to them as ‘never-defined’. Also, sometimes I swear in the hope cool kids will like me.

Never mind the child stats, never mind the national truancy stats, never mind the hopeless failure of Maori to educate their children and stop them bashing their babies. No, it’s all the Pakeha’s fault. It’s all about hating whitey. Believe me, that’s what it looked like the other day.

Māori can be blamed for all of society’s problems. Māori parents are especially at fault. They should follow the example of exemplary parents like myself. The children of perfect, white parents like ME never develop $1000-a-day P habits.

John Key speaks bravely about going there again. He should not go there again. It’s over. Forget it. It is too awful and nasty and common. It is no more New Zealand day than Halloween.

I am orgasming over John Key so must write in short sentences.

Our national day is now Anzac Day. Anzac Day is a day of honour, and struggle, bravery and sacrifice. A day on which we celebrate the periods when our country embraced great efforts for international freedom and on which we weep for those who served and for those who died. I wouldn’t take my three great uncles who died at Gallipoli and in France - Reuben, Mathew and Leonard - to Waitangi Day and expect them to believe this was our national day. I wouldn’t take my father, veteran of El Alamein and Cassino, there. Nor would I take my Uncle Ken who died in a Wellington bomber, then try and tell him Waitangi Day was anything but filth.

I am related to white men with noble sounding names. I am will now go about dragging their names through the mud by association to me.

No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it. Let them go and raid a bit more kai moana than they need for the big, and feed themselves silly, speak of the injustices heaped upon them by the greedy Pakeha and work out new ways of bamboozling the Pakeha to come up with a few more millions. When you start doing talkback or any kind of opinion broadcasting in New Zealand you learn that certain groups are loony, highly vocal, highly organised and they never rest. The second looniest are the anti-fluoride crowd. But leave them aside for today.

Isn’t it funny how I use te reo Māori here? How ridiculous – an indigenous culture having a unique language. In addition to heaping offensive stereotype upon offensive stereotype about Māori being ‘big’ and only good for gorging themselves like the savages that they are, I will also use words like ‘loony’ because the only thing funnier than racial minorities is people with mental illnesses.

The row actually started with Piri Weepu filming a public health commercial in which he’s seen bottle-feeding his daughter who has an allergy to dairy and the message is that she will grow up in a non-smoking house. That was the message, for God’s sake. And it’s a nice image. Dad, an All Black hero, Maori of the Year, bottle-feeding his little girl.

Please ignore the obvious irony of me holding up Piri Weepu as some great, iconic Kiwi father when I have just spent the past 500ish words either explicitly or implicitly stating that all Māori are – among other things – weirdos, lazy, greedy, hateful, ‘loony’, abusive, ‘silly’, self-righteous and manipulative. It is an irrelevant point.

Many mothers would have appreciated seeing a baby being bottle-fed. Others appreciated that it showed a man involved in an intense part of nurturing baby. One or two mothers came forward this week and spoke about how they’ve been monstered by bullying women in supermarkets who berated them for buying formula.

HE’S FEEDING A BABY. HE’S TAKING AN ACTIVE ROLE IN PARENTING. He’s also part of the group of Māori parents that is wholly responsible for all of the child abuse and educational failures in this country, but ignore that because HE’S A MAN AND HE’S HOLDING THE BABY. Women, bow your heads.

Most mothers want to breast feed, I’m sure. No one disputes this. Some simply can’t. And in the case of Piri’s little girl, she can’t handle dairy. But the hysterics saw a man, a bottle and a baby and were about to erupt. Never mind the positives, the non-smoking household, the All Black tenderly feeding his little girl. There was man and a baby and a bottle and it was the crime of the century.

I have felt the need to refer to Piri’s daughter as his ‘little girl’ three times in this article. This is to emphasise the tenderness of a man feeding his child. Also, please take special note of how progressive and open-minded I am in realising that not all women can breast-feed.

Take it off, screamed La Leche, obviously. And suddenly the segment disappeared. The chief executive of the Health Sponsorship Council, which made the ad, is Iain Potter. Mr Potter says the council received overwhelming opposition to the bottle-feeding clip. I bet it did. And I bet I know who from. Iain Potter should show some common sense, grow some balls, and learn to stand up to a highly organised band of intolerant people.

Obviously, this group were screaming. They’re hysterical women! Poor old Iain Potter was subject to so much screaming from these harping harpies that, being the ball-less, senseless man that it is, he listened to them! Outrageous. Oh, also, me having the audacity to call anyone else on this planet intolerant? Just put that in for some lols.

Overseas, just to change the subject and keep an elegant internationalism in the column, can you believe Russia’s and China’s intransigence at the United Nations Security Council on the matter of Syria?

I am tiring of attacking Māori and hysterical women, let’s move overseas and find new groups of people about which I can make offensive comments!

So now Syria will grind on in broken, abject misery for the rest of the year until they shoot the despot. I can’t figure old rat-face Bashir. He must know that he’s going the way of Gaddafi, with a refuge in a filthy sewer pipe for a while before the bullet in the head, being towed backwards through the streets to public display in a meat locker.

People from countries like Syria and Libya are lower beings than even Māori so I am going to talk about them as less than human and instead make analogies to rodents. I will just sit here waxing lyrically about the situation in a country where hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and amuse myself by being grotesque. Cool?

He’s married to a very beautiful British woman, Bashir, a real English rose. One report suggested she and her family had tried to leave Syria last week but the convoy had been seen and turned back. She must know what’s coming. Armageddon is what’s coming. One dreads to imagine what they’ll do to her pretty face.

I am going to end this article with a completely irrelevant mention of Bashir’s wife, who – like Piri Weepu’s daughter, but unlike my male ancestors who fought in wars – is not worthy of an actual name. I then will reassert my journalistic prowess by ending this vitriolic rant with the one concern we all have about the unrest in Syria: the fate of the white woman’s pretty face.

Di, we thank you for your insightful translation.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is shit. Here's why.

First, how many of you omit the possessive apostrophe and write "Valentines Day?" You know it's the day of St Valentine, right? Following from that, how many of you write "Valentines Day" after posting an annoying meme on Facebook to show the world you know how to use some form(s) of punctuation? Well Captain Awesome, now that you can demonstrate the difference between:

(i) "A woman, without her man, is nothing" and;

(ii) "A woman: without her, man is nothing,"

maybe you could learn to use a fucking apostrophe.

Of course I'm only using one form of smarm to criticise another but the message of this blog is that everything is shit and that includes me. Naturally, I'm single and unlovable and VD is another slap in the face but that's not the motivation for this post.

The greater problem with VD (yep, that's the joke, you got it, well done) is that it's yet another conduit for those without their own thoughts to blindly do as they're told by external entities, not just with the lubby-dubby crap but with our gender roles. Men, buy a tacky card cos Hallmark told you to. Men, spend thirty times the regular price on a single bloody rose which will die in a week cos the florist told you to. Ladies, don't be so fucking frigid and put out for once, even though we all know it's only men who enjoy sex. This is the one day a year that men NEED to show their women (obviously) that they appreciate them by following the well prescribed "idiot's-guide-to-stuff-girls-like" you've seen on every bullshit TV show and movie. Dontcha go stepping out of your gender roles or anything. This is a time warp. The 1950s ended over half a century ago but not on February 14. Every other day of the year, blokes can be a complete tools cos there's always/only Valentine's Day when we can show we care by doing the things society has told us that we can do to show we care. Men, we've put it into a window and institutionalised it so we won't look like sissies.

Well fuck that.

My heart is well and truly broken on VD because I've got to watch normally thinking adults be dictated to without regard for logic.

Here's some Harry Nilsson, not for any of my ex-girlfriends but for everyone who fell into the quagmire of VD.