A fist full of dollars

This waste of money is criminal said Mr. McVicar.

“With the recent media scrum over the Telecom campaign it seems there is more coverage and public outcry over this than say when someone gets murdered or a repeat offender gets paroled before his sentence is served.

We know that 60% of criminals will reoffend and cause incalculable long lasting damage to innocent people, while rape and unspeakable mayhem runs riot all-round us the best Telecom can do is fund a disastrous ‘abstain’ campaign.

Oh Garth, you must be feeling so neglected, so ignored. The media are not talking about your Trust and your Trust's survey, the one that the MPs declined to answer. The media are avoiding you. Instead, they have got all excited about a rather tacky ad campaign, one with a tangential relationship to the rugby world cup, a campaign which many Kiwi mums and dads find more interesting than the rugby world cup or the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

So, what's an ordinary cow-cocky from the Hawke's Bay and dedicated family man to do? A quintessential Kiwi battler can do but one thing: he's going to sit right down and write himself a media release, one which tries to shame Telecom into giving money to his Trust (and don't forget the survey).

Meanwhile, back in commentary land, Mr Paul Holmes - a man with an uncanny ability to imitate his speech patterns in his writing - wants to tell us how bad the Telecom ad is:

Let me tell you how bad it was. It was vile. It was disgusting. It was dumb. It was filthy. It was seedy. It was grossly offensive. It was ghastly and rude.

Worse still, it brought back memories:

And what was Sean driving? A fist? That was unfortunate too. We learned about fisting from anti-gay nutters during the homosexual law reform debate 30 years ago. The ad wasn't a nice reminder.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. Given that almost every television advertisement for the rugby world cup has featured men in tight shirts and tighter shorts, shorts barely concealing their buns of steel, buns in slow motion, somehow the big pink fist with the black rubber ring seems all too natural a progression. The next advertisement in the series was to have featured a Trojan horse, so perhaps we narrowly avoided further exploration of the connexions between Rugby Union and Greek Love.

Meanwhile, in Geyserland, overweight, raucous, hyperactive, pie-munching Hori meets a visitor from Hawkes Bay:

She said Hori attacked her without warning, treating it as if it were a joke.

"Hori grabbed hold of my beak," she said.

He told her: "I don't care, the cameras are on us, carry on."

Stafford said Hori was cutting off her air supply and a stern response was needed to bring him back to his senses.

"I just lifted my knee and went into his balls." Hori then grabbed his testicles in pain, stood vacantly for a second, then "wobbled off."

"For the rest of the game he just stood underneath the goalposts."

Here's Placebo. Garth, you won't like this.