Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours...

This had us chuckling in the weekend, essentially, after an 18 month dispute over a sewer pipe running through his property, a man cut the pipe at the boundary and capped it, leaving the neighbour with nowhere to go.

Neighbour cuts sewer pipe | Stuff.co.nz

What was particularly amusing to us is that we know both parties, one used to shear our sheep, the other sweeps our chimneys.

A portrait of the artist wearing Toxic Shorts

Everyone's got their costumes for special occasions, I've got a dinner suit upstairs that has seen a few formal outings, I have suits & jackets for work, I have certain clothes for walking the dog, pretty much the same set for gardening & an old business shirt & the Toxic Shorts for painting.

Actually, I retired the Toxic Shorts today, and replaced them with the shapeless track pants I bought for $5 in Rebel Sports about 5 years ago wore only once because people would stare at me in public.

The Toxic Shorts were bought some years ago on Castaway Island in Fiji, they were white & blue, with the Castaway Island logo down one side. I bought them for swimming togs, but only wore them once in the sea as they went completely transparent.

Their appearance, transparency aside, was not so great that I'd consider wearing them to a social occasion such as a barbecue, so they became painting attire.

No-one's painting attire looks stylish, but every appearance af the Toxic Shorts brought such remark, that the shorts achieved some level of family notoriety. Garlic cloves & crucifixes would be dusted off & worn prominently.

I was painting tongue-and-groove in the laundry today, it's a long story, but the clothes dryer got moved, the vent hole was plugged, the tongue-and-groove sanded & filled & then glooped over with something like a cross between putty and undercoat (it hides a lot of sins - there're a few borer so this is just a stop gap until the wall cladding gets replaced at some unspecified future time.) Today I applied the first top coat.

At some stage Mrs Llew popped in & noted the absence of the Toxic Shorts. But she said "What the hell is with that hideous old T shirt?"

"Doesn't it make me look like Marlon Brando?" I enquired.

"Yes, but not the young one." Was the final judgement.

Still, the laundry wall looks better than it has in years.

Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs here!

Am I the only person who is wondering if the dog that that Tongan guy barbecued in Auckland the other day was registered? I mean, he can get a refund on his registration fee if the dog dies. Yeah right.

Am I the only person who thought "One less neglected pit bull terrier cross off the streets"?

Am I the only one getting more curmudgeonly in my old age?

We slaughter thousands of animals in all sorts of disgusting ways every day for food, leather & soap (check those ingredients sometime). We euthanise hundreds, if not thousands of dogs for sundry reasons each year... you see where I'm going with this right?

Ask yourself, what would Kwai Chang Cain do?

Stoush over Wainuiomata monastery - Stuff.co.nz

It still grieves me that he was found dead in a hotel cupboard with his dick in his hand...

Scenes from another planet

Were "theme parties" a 1980s thing? Or does every decade subject itself to the phenomenon?

Here's the picture that will shortly embarrass a friend of mine on the anniversary of his half century on Earth.



I avoid theme parties these days, but it appears there were times I pulled out the stops. Must have been drunk. I recall I was wearing a cute vampire for a lot of this evening. Must have liked bananas.

Scenes from another century

The brother of an old friend emailed me the other day, he asked if I could search out any old & embarrassing photos of his youngest brother, in time for his 50th birthday. And so I found myself in the attic, dredging out scenes from my life from so long ago, they were printed on paper. Many have degraded to the point of unscannability (is that a word?).



I remember having multiple copies of this photo made around 1978 or 1979 for everone involved. It was taken at Staglands in Upper Hutt. The camera was sitting on the top of someone's car.

Included are myself, 4 guys I went to college with, two guys who were in my 1st stage English tutorial, two friends of one of those guys, and two friends of one of those friends. Among others, they're who I hung out with much of my time at university.

These people can be variously described, without doing them any justice whatsoever, and only accurate at all at that point in time - many of these people have changed in ensuing years. But they included the sporto, the "good bloke", bookish guy, the "complex" one with a hint of narcissism that irritated everyone & bludged cigarettes, the party girl, the accountant to be, the muso, the serious drug consumer, the chick everyone wanted to shag, and the chick everyone did shag. The lines between them were a little more blurred than that suggests though.

Apologies if you're in this photo, you choose which one you were OK?

I flatted with one of them for years, and I know where all are at the moment, save for 3. I still catch up with 3 of them regularly. Some are overseas. Not all of them still have hair.