Subject line: John Cleese, Sting + MSP!

I bought a keyboard from a guy who was selling on AsiaXpat. It cost me $400 (US$52; NZ$94; 10,315 Hungarian Forint) and it has a multitude of sounds. If I could be bothered getting out of bed to look, I could tell you exactly how many. But I’m not going to. I’m that kind of guy.

Drums? Don’t need ‘em. My keyboard ($400) has an in-built drum programme, so I’ll never have to meet another drumer. Also, I can use my keyboard to write hit songs that make me lots of money. That is good because we’re heading into an ECONOMIC CRISIS, during which everyone will be miserable but at least they’ll go to concerts, where they’ll hear the music created by my Yamaha Somethingsomething and be enthralled.

I would include a photo, but I can’t figure out how to use Bluetooth on the HTC Diamond phone I acquired for free from a friend. I had the swanky phone one day before I ran down a hill with it and another phone in my pocket. The Diamond got pretty badly scratched, which is ironic because I thougt diamonds are, like, really hard or something.

I haven’t updated in a while. What else have I been doing?

Well, I’m now in an awesome band. We’ve had a total of four practices. Our first single is about a dispute on the MTR.

I’ve been going to shows. I reviewed Billy Joel. He was alright. Looked a bit naff trying to pull karate moves.

I interviewed Sting. That was fun.

Ditto for the Manic Street Preachers, who I’m going to see tonight.

I also interviewed John Cleese. That was good, because he’s my dad’s hero and I’m rather fond of him too. That interview will be published in the next issue of Time Out Hong Kong, but hopefully I can publish a longer transcript here later (the full interview was 4,000 words — Cleese speaks a lot).

But here’s a snip that won’t be published, for your eyes only. It came at the end of our interview:

Well, just out of interest, because my dad’s, obviously, a massive fan and has been for a long time –

Oh that’s nice. Where is he now?

He’s in New Zealand. I’m a New Zealander, but I’m living in Hong Kong.

Oh — whereabouts in New Zealand? Not Palmerston North I hope.

Well, you saw where this question was going [laughs]. No, he’s in the South Island in a small town of 5,000 people called Alexandra. Not all the people are called Alexandra, actually. I phrased that wrong. [Much laughter] Um, yeah, he’s a great admirer of you and I’ve noticed that he laughs exactly like you as well.

Oh, that’s nice. How old is he?

He’s late 50s — 58.

Oh, a young stripling.

He’ll be very happy to hear you call him that. So he wanted me to ask you about Palmerston North. Do you have any redeeming things to say about it?

Well, it was just that we went there in a middle of a tour. And it just didn’t seem to be a place that set any of us alight. And my very funny assistant referred to it as the suicide capital of New Zealand. And it was months later that I repeated his gag in an interview and suddenly – and that’s what can happen sometimes: you say something and the nobody picks it up, and six months later they suddenly get excited about it. We started to get the usual, you know, ‘It’s a wonderful wonderful city’, and I [laugh] — sarcasticly, ‘What is it that’s best about it? The suspension bridge? The hanging garden? The opera house?’

The lamingtons are good there as well, apparently.

Well, anyway. After handing out some very critical comments, then half the people of Palmerston North wrote in and said Cleese is absolutely right [much laughter]. But they got their own back on me, because they had a rubbish dump — a huge rubbish dump — which has been christened ‘Mount Cleese‘. So they got their own back.

Not quite as prestigious as a lemur.

No, no, no. The lemur — that is my proud boast to have a lemur named after me. It’s not a terribly interesting lemur but I love it very much.

And the rubbish dump surely a close second?

A close second, yes. That’s real recognition. [Laughter]

[Co-ordinator interrupts - Okay...]

Okay, thanks very much for your time John.

That was fun Hamish.

Cheers, thanks a lot. Bye.

Right-whingers

I don’t know why — maybe because I was young and fiery — but I used to get worked up by the ridiculous arguments of New Zealand’s right-wing bloggers, such as the fetid crowd who lurk around the grievously unpunctuated No Minister (and the dirty lot that roil in the sewers of those blogs’ comments).

These days, being older and wiser, I avoid such sites altogether, having realised that they’re written by powerless bunnies with more narrow-minded opinions than sense, whose minds will never be changed, who think the way to bring about positive change in society is to fulminate, bristle, thunder, and throw globules of shit at the system, the bureaucrats, the government, the lesbian cabal, the chardonnay socialists, the communists, the… whatever.

Today, via another blog, I delved just once more in the sewer pit and was relieved to find that I can actually see the humour in the situation nowadays. Some pretty flower is upset that Obama won (or, rather, that the Republicans didn’t) and has written high-mindedly about how the US had chosen a president tainted by corruption and links to terrorism.

The most hilarious thing is that the anonymous poster, going by the name Fairfacts Media (for non-Kiwi readers, that’s a piss-weak play on the name of one of the country’s biggest media owners, Fairfax), seems to labour under the illusion that what he’s writing actually matters.

Mr Fairfacts, let’s put this in context: you’re a volunteer blogger echoing the most reductive arguments of the discredited extreme right, and you don’t even understand the worth of line-breaks. You might as well be a 15-year-old boy who’s never seen a girl’s special parts. In fact, there’s a good chance you are.

Anyway, thanks for giving me a laugh and providing proof I have actually grown up.

President Obama