Jono explains life through graphs

I have a friend. She's a lovely young thing who has had a bit of a poohs time recently and has returned from doing good works in Asia to take some time out to get over a relationship break-up. The man in question must have a head full of sawdust because she's gorgeous, bubbly, optimistic, intelligent and has a sweet nature and so when it came to her asking me why boys act like him I had to look back upon my own personal experience (thus, I would add that I am in no way immune from my summations)

To illustrate predominantly why young men break up with their girlfriends I drew her the first graph. Now, when men of this particular vintage are responsible for breaking up with their girlfriends, their reasons can be pigeon-holed in varying degrees anywhere in this triangular continuum. You'll note at each axis point the behaviours stupid, selfish and horny. Let's take for example Bloke 1. He broke up with his girlfriend because she didn't know the words to Kenny Rogers The Gambler, which he thinks is the greatest song ever written. Now there's some validity to their break-up because the two are fundamentally unsuited to each other because our girl has better taste than wanting to have The Gambler played as she walks up the aisle. Bloke number 1's break-up reason is stupid. He's not especially selfish because he wanted them to do something together (i.e. get plastered and sing The Gambler) and his reason isn't based on horniness because he's not chasing anyone else.

Graph 1. What sort of idiot my friend's ex boyfriend is.

Bloke number 2 broke up with his girlfriend because instead of letting him play X-Box for 14 hours a day on the weekends, she wanted to go out to a concert and meet up with other couples and have fun. Bloke number 2's reason is borderline stupid, but has its own validity because it demonstrates that he is too self-centred for their relationship to be a success. Our girl will be better off without him drawing the curtains and entertaining himself while he drools gently and she sits in the kitchen hoping the flickering lights and constant noise gives him a stroke.

Bloke 3 broke up with his girlfriend because he met another girl at a party, got her number and wants to rub his private parts against her instead. As long as he has a string of chances with other girls, he will keep breaking up. Bloke 3 is archetypal horny and again, our girl is better off without him. Then we get to Bloke 4, who is my friend's ex-boyfriend. I won't go into particulars. but I was tempted to drag him across into the hornier part of the continuum because his friends took him to a strip joint just after they broke up. I cannot be sure he wanted to go with them, but I'm tempted to drag him into the street and give him a fucking good hiding anyway.

While my friend absorbed this first graph, she said she understood, but she felt like crap. "Okay.", said I. I have a graph for that too. The second graph offers an explanation as to what happens to men and women's contentment post break-up. I want to elaborate why I use the word contentment as opposed to happiness: happiness is the temporary state of what contentment is long term. You can be happy one minute and miserable the next, however contentment is the result of collective feelings. In this situation, men experience a surge of euphoric happiness arising from their sudden freedom. They can eat and drink what they like, they can spend hours doing stupid things like playing computer games, going to the pub, watching cricket and attempting to fornicate with anyone with standards low enough to allow them. It really is terrific. However, over time, the typical man will start to feel that their life is devoid of order and while there may be plenty of people in their lives and around them, they just feel lonely. As their contentment ebbs away, they will find that they begin to crave the very thing that they shrugged off at the very beginning.

Graph 2. Her ex may be flushed with freedom now, but
believe me, it's a slippery slope.

Women feel differently. The experience of a break-up starts off as an act of trauma that is followed by a definite grieving process. However, women experience improvement over time as they realise the full array of new options open to them along with the surge in their self-confidence. Their self-confidence is the key to having their contentment improve over time until they feel comfortable enough within themselves to want to fuck up their next victim's life. As both sexes proceed along the timeline, they find both themselves in a position to enter their next relationship. Anything else is just too soon.

By this stage my friend at least had a smile on her face, but it helped her realise that the path to getting over our man Bloke 4 was going to be a process and not a matter of her listening to someone telling her to cheer up, or from the temporary relief of getting liquored. On top of all my advice, I have offered her my other unique service: I have offered to break into his house and do a shit on his pillow.

Thoughts during a recent trip to the supermarket

So, everything that appears in regular non-italics was said, everything in italics was thought, but was perilously close to being thought out loud. Warning: this is a post with quite possibly the most swearing in it I have ever written.
I arrived home from work tonight at around 6pm for Attila the Wife to ask me to drive to the local supermarket to get a loaf of vaguely specialty bread for her to use in the making of dinner. 
"Oh for fuck's sake, what a colossal embuggerance. I just wanted to slump on the couch and wish I was dead for a while. The supermarket? Really? You must fucking hate me."
Spend five minutes looking for my wallet, only for Attila the Wife to find it in the trouser pocket of the shorts I was wearing in the weekend. Attila then completely unable to suppress a look of smug triumph.
"Shut up. I fucking hate you." 
"Shut up. I fucking hate you."

Stomp to car. Reverse out of driveway only to have to wait for old lady in motorised shopping trolley, white knuckles clutching at her steering wheel in fear, to drive past at 5 miles an hour.
"Hurry up you stupid fucking whore!"
Now following at five miles an hour then waiting at a quiet intersection for her to decide which way she's going to turn and then for another two minutes while she waits for the car that is five hundred metres away to pass by. 
"Oh my good fucking God! How have you not been beaten to death by a queue of traffic yet! Fuck! My! Life! Where the fuck is Morgan Freeman when you need him?"
Drive up to narrow chicane and dutifully wait for on-coming van to drive through. On-coming van driven by dreadlocked hippy lady meanders up to chicane and then stops just short to let me through despite me having waited for her.
"Jesus fucking Christ almighty, what the fucking hell is wrong with you?! Have those shitlocks piled on your stupid fucking head caused your brain to overheat?! Fuck me, why aren't you in a commune somewhere in fucking Bolivia! Fuck off and die."
Drive through traffic lights and then straight through roundabout, noticing both cars in front didn't indicate when exiting.
"Am I the only fucking person in creation that obeys the fucking road rules? Bastards."

Approach supermarket, notice Christmas decorations in adjoining shop windows with smiling stock-photo families smiling inanely.
"Fuck off you bastards. I hope someone finds a pipe-bomb under the fucking tree."
Enter supermarket. Walk through fruit and veg section, scowl at other dreadlocked hippy lady.
"I hate all you hippy bastards."
Get detained near butchery counter by woman with a horde of children, all dithering idly through aisle.
"Hurry UP you bastards! Why couldn't you keep your legs together you stupid fucking trollop. Fucking hurry UP!"
Finally get clear only to nearly get cleaned out by some wanker coming out of a bisecting aisle who doesn't even apologise and then runs into another trolley rounding the aisle-end.

Ha. Not this time. Or any other time.

"Why don't you think that there might be someone coming from the other direction, cunt-chops? I hope you die in a house-fire. Arsehole."
"Arsehole."
Locate bread. Find only bread that almost meets but falls just short of Attila's expectations. It might as well be mouldy, baked by Hitler and be in Sri Lanka. Grab the least worst and turn, only to be cut off by a large, puffy, tattooed, female Bogan-thing.
"Ugh. Look what you've done to yourself. Underneath that thick layer of greasy white fat is a thin, un-tattoed person but sadly is still a fucking idiot."
Get to check-outs only for the dreadlocked hippy lady to take the only free one with her half-full shopping trolley, oblivious to the fact I have only one item.
"What's yellow and red and looks good on hippies? Fire."
Pay for my item and walk up to self-opening doors. Doors only start to open when about a foot and a half away.
"Just another fucking thing to add to the litany of inconveniences deliberately put in my way by the rest of mankind."
Start to move through middle of door, only to be obstructed by a horde of other people coming the other way who cannot think far enough ahead to look through the doorway to see if there is anyone in their path or to think about maybe making some space for them.
"What am I, fucking invisible?!"
"Let me through, I'm a doctor."

Move to car, reverse out of carpark and drive toward carpark exit. Shitbox car stops ahead of me on the other side of the driveway, lets out passenger and then within twenty metres of me, does a U-turn, forcing me to stop suddenly.
"What sort of fucking arsehole are you, you fucking arsehole! As long as you're alright you stupid fucking shitbrained ring-sausage dickhead wanker!"
Muttering in this manner went on for as long as this car was within eyesight. Finally lose sight of this vehicle and turn off to my street. Avoid four wheel drive on wrong side of road driven by contractor who has a phone up to his ear.
"Oh my, aren't we important, you selfish bastard!"
Pull into driveway. Sit dejected and scowling, overcome because of the recognition that as I get older, there will be more and more that the world offers me that will confuse, irritate and outrage me. Car door opened by Attila who asks if a cuddle would make me feel better.
No. I need a gallon of rum and a taser for when I'm next out in public. That'll make me feel better.

Incidentally, the bread wasn't right either.

Just a quick one before putting up the new site...

Okay, I admit it: I've been a bit of an idle bastard and haven't moved particularly fast on transferring everything over to the new site. Trust me though, it is in the pipeline. But just as a sweetener for your continued support, here's a couple of letters I've written to Members of Parliament recently.
Love from Jono the BArSTewARD

Changes are afoot...

Ah there you are. Pull up a wingback and pour yourself a snifter of something expensive. Settled? Good.

Right, the fact of the matter is that there's a distinct smell of change in the air whether I win, lose or draw in the election ending next weekend. As a consequence there will be quite a bit of work done on giving this blog a bit of a shake up. The biggest change is that it will be moving to a new website, but not to worry, I'll provide links and clever things that take you directly there and you don't have to strain yourself by making any extra clicks to get there. 
Another thing you don't have to worry about is that the current mixture of bile, misanthropy and ranting will not change. The headings will not change either: I will synopsise*, I will pontificate on beer and things will continue to get fucked as they have since time immemorial (i.e. since March this year).

But there will be new things. Shiny things. Things you can buy that will give you validation in your life. You can tell me I'm selling out if you like, but if you got paid in lumps of coal like I do, you'd be trying to augment your income as well, believe me. Besides, Google Adsense doesn't want a bar of this blog because of all the fucking swearing.
No, the new version of the blog will be 27.8% better and 41.7% brighter. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, massage my ego and tell me so.
See you there.

Jono the BArSTewARD

*It's a neologism, run with it.

Because some bastard has to change the world...

I'm flattered to have regular readers of this blog and I must apologise for the lack of action. Just because I haven't posted for more than a month, it doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. I have accumulated a new volume of bile and cynicism in this time because I have put my hand up, paid my deposit and I'm running for office in local government.

Actually, it's rather fun. For an exercise in vanity there aren't many dodges quite like it. You get your name put on all sorts of paraphernalia and suddenly in your pursuit to become one of the great and the good you become important to community groups, journalists and other assorted ratbags. But for all that fun there are the inevitable chains that drag. I get loads of emails and they are of two kinds. The first starts with 'Dear Mr Bastard, As a council candidate we realise that your time is precious. Rather than coming to talk to our group about what half-baked idiocy you stand for, please answer these six questions with answers of no more than 200 words by X O'clock tomorrow. Yours etc...' I dread these emails because that's 1,200 words or around an hour and a half of writing and you do have to use the maximum allowance because the questions aren't easy ones like 'What is the name of your cat?' It's like being at university all over again only the deadlines are much tighter.

"For the cheap price of one arm and one leg we'll run you
an ad that can be seen by our wide circulation if they all have
a microscope and haven't voted for someone else already."

The other kind of email are very kind invitations by advertisers to spend your campaign funds with them. This is all well and good if you have campaign funds to spend, after all, candidates in my particular contest are allowed to spend up to $80,000. Believe it or not, some will spend the full allowance, but I won't be mainly because this is more than twenty five times my budget and once you take out printing costs, petrol and other assorted niceties such as vouchers for the volunteers who are helping pollute the letterboxes in my ward, I have just enough left for... actually, there's nothing left. So the advertising emails, while tempting, go unanswered especially when the cost of advertising is either expensive or horrifically expensive. But then, this is democracy for you. The cap was brought in to prevent candidates effectively buying their way in, but with the limit so high this problem persists unmitigated.
If you'd like to help by foolishly throwing a bit of cash my way, click here.

So for all this effort and outlay, what have I seen?
Well: Traditionally local elections get an extremely poor turnout by voters so candidates really have to work their freckles off to get their messages across. This particular election is important for my city as we rebuild and there is a considerable amount of money to be spent (carefully). What is bewildering is that the public really don't care. They don't care that the people they are electing administer an annual budget of $2.2b and that the incumbents that they elected to do this in my ward are a housewife and a former male stripper. People don't want to see leaflets in their mailboxes, billboards around town and have flyers given to them in the street because they see the whole election as a colossal annoyance. These are the people who have also been unified in their outrage at the saga surrounding the performance, pay and exit of the Chief Executive of the council; they are also uniformly irritated by the patchwork nature of the repairs to the streets of Christchurch; the are uniformly angry that the central government seems to be calling the shots in our city. Will they vote? I hope so. They have had their ballot papers mailed out to them, all they have to do is tick a few boxes and put it back in the post... a task beyond the ability or bother of many, believe me.

Why did I bother to put my hand up? Because some bastard had to and I genuinely believe that I have something to contribute to the council table: me with my shiny new LLB, my background in field engineering, my elegant suit and my finely tuned bullshit detector. 
The results are in on October 14.
Watch this space.

How to survive the apocalypse from the comfort of your own kitchen

Kyle Chapman wants to be mayor. Yeah, good
luck with that.

Every time there is an election, be it for local or central government, Kyle Chapman makes a $200 donation to the Electoral Commission. Strictly speaking this is a deposit that designed to weed out frivolous candidacy that the candidate will get back if they receive 25% of the votes of the eventual winner. Kyle Chapman is a good example that this doesn't necessarily work, but the Electoral Commission has his money and doesn't care. This year Kyle has decided to throw his hat in the ring for the Christchurch mayoralty and for a seat on the council in the Hagley-Ferrymead ward bringing to mind such phrases as 'pissing in the wind', 'a snowball's chance' 'about as likely as Elvis landing a UFO on top of the Loch Ness Monster's forehead' because Kyle, bless him, is a knob. The studious of you will have read his wikipedia page that states that he is the leader of the Right Wing Resistance and is a survivalist intent on creating a 'European land base'. Let's just think about that for a minute... survivalist... European land base. Kyle thinks that we are still one step away from oblivion and he and the other survivalists will be all that is left in a world that closely resembles Mad Max. If cockroaches and Kyle Chapman are all that are left, then I'll be glad to be dead. 

But then, I am going to survive the apocalypse. You see, I learned how to survive a nuclear, biological or chemical attack when I was in the Army. I also know how to purify water, build shelter, navigate through a minefield without being blown into purple mist and I learned to handle weaponry should Kyle and his mates come knocking. However, the real reason I am going to survive the apocalypse is because I can live off the land and make stuff in the kitchen. Well any fool can make stuff in the kitchen, even if it's toast you say. What happens when the bread runs out? I can bake more. Pasta? I can make that from scratch too. Other provisions I can turn my hand to and make from raw ingredients are sausages, beer, marmalade, pickled onions, chutney, fruit leather, in fact I am probably only limited by my imagination and the tools I have in my kitchen. My pantry is replete and when I open the door I smile. I get enormous satisfaction from making and consuming my own food, however this stops short of posting photographs of said food on facebook, although I have to confess to once taking a photo of some sausages I had braided simply because I was proud of myself and wanted the world to know how clever I was. 
A self-braided sausage is a beautiful thing. 
You ought to try it.

George and Michael deep in discussion about submitting a
name change by deed poll.
I suppose I could have called them Kyle and Chapman.

Further to my kitchen-based pottering, my flash new garden has more fruit trees than I could ever possibly handle once they are in fruit. Purely for my own edification, here is a shortlist: three apple trees, a pear, two limes, three lemons, three large feijoas, a nectarine, a peach, a quince, seven olives, a grapevine, a passionfruit vine, a papaya, three blackcurrants, boysenberry canes, two kiwifruit vines, a mandarin, a large strawberry bed, a cranberry and a cherry tree. What I don't make into cider will become jellies, jams, more marmalade and unwanted gifts for those unfortunate enough to know me.
It just so happens that there are extensive vegetable beds and we have a couple of new inmates in the form of hens named George and Michael. More birds will be arriving named Elton and John, Lionel and Ritchie (Yes I know that hens are female and those are all male names. We thought it would be funny and the hens have not framed a convincing argument illustrating their opposition to their monikers). It seems that Atilla the Wife and I didn't buy a house, we've inadvertently bought a very small farm (738m²) that happens to have a house on it. So come a nuclear armageddon and the resultant shriveling of the food supply, we'll be fine thank you very much and Kyle and his survivalists in North Canterbury can eat shit and die.

LLB: a study in futility or a passport to greatness?

Just because you have a law degree, it doesn't
make you Rumpole. God, I wish it did.

This post is brought to you by the letter L and the number four and a half. I was tempted to muse on the L that I have just been working on, which is Lime and Grapefruit Marmalade, but this is not the sole source of my joy this weekend. You see, I found out on Friday that after four and a half years of dutifully turning up to lectures, only half listening to them and then panicking when it came to exam time, I have now completed my law degree. I have finished and bring on the lawyer jokes, because until I pass the bar exam I cannot be called a lawyer and I still have my soul in my possession. A law degree is a funny thing because it doesn't enable you to do anything you couldn't do without one except sit the bar exam, and even then, you still have the additional proviso that in New Zealand you have to have passed the legal ethics paper. So if you aren't contemplating becoming a lawyer in New Zealand, you may have letters LLB after your name, but it entitles you to bugger-all.
Those undergoing the arduous slog of their law degree can take some comfort in the fact that once they have been admitted to the ranks of LLB holders, they are entitled to describe themselves as 'esquire' rather than 'mister'. You can do this, but no-one does. Why? Because you'd have to be either Bill.S Preston and about to undergo a big adventure or a bogus journey, or you'd have to be a massive, massive tool.
The only other thing holding an LLB allows you to do is to fold it into a $45,000 paper dart and see how far it flies.

So, unless you become a practicing lawyer, your shiny new LLB is of no use whatsoever, so what does a law degree actually teach you? Does it teach you what the law is? Behave. The law is viciously convoluted: many brilliant minds have been working for thousands of years and creating millions of laws by legislation, precedent and action that if Methuselah himself had started trying to describe it as a fresh faced young student, he wouldn't have finished in his 900th year. I think it politic to adapt PG Wodehouse' description of futility for this one. You've as much chance of describing what the law is than a one armed blind man has of getting half a pound of melted butter into a wild-cat's left ear with a red hot needle. It just can't be done. So, does a law degree give you a basic handle on what the law is in a specific area? Well, yes and no. I have a friend who happens to be a partner at a Christchurch law firm and he said that everything he learned at law school twelve years ago is now completely and hopelessly out of date.
So what the bloody hell have I been doing for the last four and a half years that was so arduous except for the cryptic crossword?
Logic, old thing. Logic.

Shotguns at the ready... pull!

My degree announces to the world that I have reached a standard in expressing logical thought. I can approach an issue from several angles, break it down into its elements and then solve each element until an overall solution manifests itself. Then I can walk away and hopefully email a bill to someone. You know what else four and a half years at university has taught me?
Not to do it again.
It's also taught me to be slightly more dangerous in a pub quiz, however, I hope that my new found qualification can be used properly in arenas other than answering trivia questions in a pub, although that's a pretty good start.