Geltenden - Valid

Forgetting to validate your Oyster card on London’s transport network will cost you an arm and a leg. At the current arm/leg mid-market rate, £4 is approximately one baboon forearm and a fluffy kitten’s femur. So if you care in the slightest about animal welfare, you’ll do good to remember. Such a high tech system - the Oyster fare card, not the creature limb-based fining - is vastly removed from what happens aboard Auckland’s trains and busses. To use a needlessly porn-based comparison, it’s the crude, primitive whacks-works of Victorian times vs. the imminent six-dimensional hyper-sexploitation flicks of the 2100’s. My (often flawed, if I’m honest) logic dictates the more automated a ticketing system, the less staff are required, thus making the fares sort of cheaper. So you’d think that by having an average of three ticket agents on every single suburban train in Auckland, it’d make getting anywhere more expensive than a cashmere sweater where the wool’s been substituted for actual cash, merely for a terrible pun. Not the case! Like the direction of draining water swirling around local plugholes, so many things are backwards here it can get quite confusing. A twenty-minute train journey from my suburb of Morningside costs $2.80, but if I walk ten minutes up the road to the next station, the price is halved. At the current Pound/NZ Dollar mid-market rate, $1.40 is approximately 61p. It feels wrong to be paying so little for what would be over an hour’s walk and cost about four times as much in England. There’s no machines to buy your tickets in advance, so they have to be bought - cash only - onboard. They’re torn out of a book, then hole-punched; a system the Victorians would at best have considered technologically average. How exactly they manage to keep their army of ticket inspectors employed with such an inefficient system is mystifying. Also, they’re somehow able to afford several Dyson Airblade hand dryers in the toilets at Britomart, the city’s main station. These the same toilets in which they’re expecting visits from intravenous drug users - this evident through all the entrancing ultraviolet lighting. I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate thieving junkie, dangling a $1500 Airblade in my face would be asking for trouble. Especially when I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate clean-freak nutter offered a freshly wall-ripped Airblade for $300 outside the station, I’d definitely take it.

So really for none of this I have cause for complaint: valid tickets for next to nothing and the chance of scoring a state-of-the-art, hospital-grade HEPA filter-housing hand-drying revolution for a bargain basement price. I’ll take that over a bleedin’ Oyster card any day.

Notbetrieb - Emergency Operation

Only once have I ever played Hasbro’s Operation in an emergency. A made-up friend at university one day banged on my door like a genuine mental, screaming that if I didn’t play with him he’d wrench out the tweezers and force them inside the next diminutive plastic person he saw. Unfortunately, a dwarf with fake tits called Carrie lived across the way, so I couldn’t in good conscience ignore him. Just in case. Okay, so I’ve never played Operation, but I’ve always loved board games. Ever the bastard little kid, I remember blubbing my eyes out in Toys R Us when my mum wouldn’t buy me Mouse Trap - instead (heartlessly) choosing to spend money on my brother’s birthday present. Of course she caved and cretinous little me got the goods anyway. I was a real shit, but had a game of zany action on a crazy contraption, so didn’t really care. My non-made-up friends at university were obsessed with Risk, and we’d routinely play till the wee hours, getting drunk and flippantly sending wave after wave of plastic triangles to their poorly-rolled-dice-determined deaths. When we weren’t killing thousands of people in a needless global power struggle, we’d enjoy similarly lengthy nights cheating each other out of ill-gotten gains on the London property market playing Monopoly. So essentially our evenings were spent learning that destroying lives physically and financially was not only fun, but necessary. It’s the western way - I’d hope for nothing less. Or more. This paragraph’s all too convoluted to tell.

Recently, however, I’ve hit a board game dry spell. The last time I remember was playing the deeply confusing Seattle version of Monopoly with a toff English twit called Tom and two girls from Orange County who had, somewhat ironically for girls from the land of massive houses, no interest in property. Once all the title deeds were sold, nobody had a complete set and nor did anyone else want to trade anything. This resulted in a meaningless hour spent swapping pittances for landing on each other’s undeveloped inner city greenbelts sites before the girls got distracted by hair, makeup and other sexist stereotypes.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly out of time and this piece has nowhere else to go. I’ve bored (ha!) myself silly and so risk (ha!) needing an emergency operation (ha!) to remove the chronic pun-secreting gland from my brain. Monopoly. Urgh.

Verstärken - Strengthened

Well here I am once again: sat in front of my keyboard, staring at a randomly selected German word and a blinking cursor. After three and a half months without an entry, it’s high time I strengthened my linguistic resolve and devised a less blatant way to shoehorn in today’s word. Another day at work spent with a thousand chronically thick customers irritating my face off (more irritatingly than Nick Cage in Face Off) finally forced me into action. I felt compelled to acquire a German to English dictionary, reasoning it’d help me release some of my frustrations textually before they manifested themselves in a far uglier, but likely far funnier way. While drawing cocks on computer screens or being sick on a plasma telly might not be as extreme or cool as a bloody workplace massacre, it’d still end up costing me money and friends I don’t have. Outputting even a smidgen of cynicism here through the telling of events bearing no relevance to the given German word should help keep that Samsung 42” puke-free a few extra days anyway. So after work I sped over to the languages section of the nearest bookshop, and some frantic searching later relaxed as I found my prize. The only one they had. Phew! Unfortunately though when I spied the $30 price tag, my dictionary-purchase-urge was killed faster than an outed paedo on a Leeds council estate. Fifteen quid for something I could get for three back home. And to clarify, that‘s the number three, not a lispy textprunciation of free. And that doesn’t even make sense, but I like the term textprunciation so much it’s guaranteed to survive the edit. So there. Anyway, not wanting to shell out good money that could have been given to charity, (but ninety-nine [plus one] percent more likely given to the supermarket for booze and cookies) some improvisation was required. I decided to (firstly construct this awfully clunky sentence, but then) head to German Google, click on news, load the top story, and with closed eyes arbitrarily jab the screen to find my word. The only problem was the first time I got ‘Karzai‘, the second ‘Afghanistan‘, the third ‘Karzai’ again. While it’d have been terribly easy to write a piece comprising of hee-larious Helmand Province/Helmann’s Mayonnaise puns and quips about dead soldiers, it wouldn’t have felt right. Thankfully, fourth time lucky threw up a word that strengthened my linguistic resol… no, that’s just awful. I’ll keep trying. Bear with me.

That’s the story so far. Hopefully this entry will serve as a half-solid foundation onto which a flurry of new, largely meaningless writings based on random words can settle. It’s almost possible that the ailing health of this blog could be bolstered, or, sigh, even strengthened by these new Antipodean ramblings. We’ll see. And that’s the best I can do. Pretty weak, huh?