Bricks Revolt, Humans Forced To Take Bus
by Adam & Lara on 09/04/10
Bricks took to the streets of Christchurch early this morning in a protest that has left several automobiles dead and hundreds seriously injured.
The macabre aftermath: Broken bricks and a destroyed BMW lie next to each other, motionless.
At 4:35 am, bricks and cinderblocks covering the exterior walls of prominent downtown Christchurch buildings freed themselves from their mortar and began pummeling parked cars below. Following the carnage, which lasted for almost one minute, at least three area cars are completely undrivable. The New Zealand Department of Transportation released an early damage report estimating that over 300 cars have been "dented and scratched to the point where owners would be embarrassed to drive them around town."
Even modest, economical vehicles with decent gas mileage and no frills were targeted, leaving their owners wallowing in temporary inconvenience.
The crisis intensified throughout the day as the victims' owners gradually realized they would have to take the bus to get to and from local supermarkets, banks, restaurants and even parks.
"I was just coming to terms with the fact that my Beemer 5-Series now looks like it's owned by a poor person," said ex-car owner Cynthia Cromwell, "when I realized that I had to take the bus to get to the spa, just like an actual poor person."
Gone in seconds: This 2009 Toyota hatchback, once a sleek and shiny road machine, now looks all denty and stupid, like some sort of crackwhore owns it.
Christchurch police have yet to uncover a motive for the gang-style attack, but Police Commissioner Howard Broad asserts the sturdy building materials were definitely provoked.
"Those parked cars, comin' and a-goin' as they please, with their shiny logos and sleek paint jobs," Broad said, "they think they're hot stuff. With their fancy-schmancy windshield wipers, wipin' away the rain with the click of a lever, never gettin' wet and such. Bricks do not have windshield wipers. I checked each one - no wipers. Think about it."
New Zealand officials say today's protest was the bloodiest clash of inanimate objects in the country since the Invercargill Road Cone Riot of 1974.
All Blacks Part 3: Winter Wonderland
by Adam & Lara on 08/28/10
Unfortunately the fun in Christchurch had to end sometime, because Adam presumes that there is a limited number of times he can not show up to work without any prior notice. So on Monday morning we were on the road again, backtracking through the mountains.
Known for its giant fruit statue, Cromwell is the esteemed home of nothing else really.
Roaring Meg is a noisy river rapid named after a prostitute from the Queenstown gold rush days who never shut up because she thought she was God's gift to comedy, but actually she was just a prostitute.
All Blacks Part 2: Holy Christchurch
by Adam & Lara on 08/27/10
Following the All Blacks victory we made ruckus happen all over Christchurch.
Attracted to bright colors and spandex-covered thighs, Lara quickly latched onto these fun-loving characters after the game.
Having not eaten for the duration of our 6 hour drive and 2 hour rugby game, we bought hotdogs. New Zealand totally ran out of hot dog buns like just before we moved here, so they gave us our hot dogs on slices of Wonderbread. The next shipment of buns should be from Japan in early 2012.
Mr. Cockram was not in, so we took a picture in front of his sign instead.
The next morning we realized that we also had McDonald's at some point.
Our hostel was fun, but didn't really live up to its name.
The next morning we were alive, awake, alert, and ready to go out exploring!
Adam needed pants so Lara brought him to the tight pants store. This pose is called "the thinker" because Adam is thinking of how he will take off those pants now that they are plastered to his body.
Warning: objects in ButtCam are more applebottom than they appear.
So take that, Christians. That's what you get for giving your town a religiously invasive name. Wait till we tell our Jewtorahbagelville friends about this.
6 Months of And Now This Is Happening
by Adam & Lara on 08/25/10
If you're a typical ANTIH reader you've been ignoring all text in this blog (due to intoxication, ADD, or illiteracy) and taking 3 second glances at the images between Farmville moves. Fantastic! That means you must have noticed our 6 month celebration banner in the sidebar.
Yesterday marked the 6th month anniversary of Adam and Lara arriving in New Zealand. Technically the blog has been around for almost 7 months, but we'd like to think that reading this blog has intellectually set all of you back 1 month, so the math works out in the end.
The dice weren't white and fuzzy when we bought them
It's hard to believe that we've been rambling on like this for half a year. It's amazing how time flies when you remove all elements of responsibility from your life. To prevent us from getting too complacent we're cracking down and giving ourselves a hard deadline of December 1st, 2012 to begin the process of thinking about getting real jobs.
All Blacks Part 1: The Mission
by Adam & Lara on 08/23/10
The last All Blacks home game of this season was Aug 7th in Christchurch, which is a 50 minute plane ride from Queenstown. There was no question about it - we had to go. Last chance to see the best team of the best sport in New Zealand play. So we bought 2 game tix, 2 plane tix and 1 flask. We were all set.
That is, until our day-of-game flight got canceled due to shit weather. It was 1:30pm, and we needed to be there by 7:30pm at the latest if we wanted to see the haka. Our situation seemed hopeless. Adam was crying again.
But we sucked it up, got in the Steema and put the pedal to the f*cking medal.
We had 6 hours to drive 500km in the rain and snow through some of the dodgiest mountain passes in the South Island. And we only had Lara's iPod with us which is full of whiny indie hipster music, which ended up complimenting the weather perfectly.
We cut corners in every way possible to save time. Actually, we just took short pee pee stops and parked illegally when we got to Christchurch. But it was enough. We threw all our shit in our room and ran to the stadium. We huffed it to our seats, diluted our whisky into a bottle of Coke (sorry Jim, we wanted it to last longer) and were completely dialed with literally 2 minutes to spare before the most electrifying non-Pujols tradition in sports:
Fresh seats in the Tui stand
We had a great view of the Jumbo-tron too
The drive was worth it. Plus, by no effort of his own Adam actually purchased the optional cancellation insurance for the plane tickets, marking the first time that Adam ever accidentally did something not catastrophic.
Hot and Meaty
by Adam & Lara on 08/22/10
No, we're not talking about Mario Lopez. Although we can't tell you the number of times he's almost made the blog post cut.
What I wouldn't give to be that Huffy 10-speed.
We're talking about meat pies. Specifically we're talking about the meat pies that we just made this afternoon that knocked our f*cking socks off. Behold:
6 hot bundles-o-meat wrapped in flaky pastry and baked to perfection in a Texas muffin tin. Presenting the pastries is the Texas muffin herself, Lara Cirkovic.
These things were delish, and this was just our first batch. By the time we get back to the States (April-ish 2011, btw) Lara will be so good at making meat pies (and Adam at eating them) that we'll be ready to open our own pie stand, a thought that has quasi-sincerely crossed our minds.
Step 1 to opening a pie stand will be devising a business plan that clearly spells out how we will run a pie stand without very quickly becoming obese.
Adam has already enlisted the help of his hilarious (and engaged - congrats!) sister Anna to come up with a name for the pie establishment to be. So far the leading candidate is "Meat Me In St. Louie."
You can't pay somebody to come up something so genius.
Welcome to the Blogosphere
by Adam & Lara on 08/19/10
Ladies and gentlemen, Adam and Lara are famous. Our blog has been blogged:
In blogspeak, this is called a trackback. In andnowthisishappeningspeak, this is called MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, BITCHES. We don't have much to say right now other than "wow." Our phones won't stop ringing, our sponsors won't stop sending us gift baskets, and our agents haven't come down from their coke binge for 2 days. For the uninitiated, that's what life is like when you get famous.
Mollie Shambeau, you're the best. You have been added to our list of Intarwebs Funnies (see sidebar) and we'll be treating you to a drink of your choice (so long as it's under $3) when you reach Queenstown.
Paul Henry has touched me.
by Adam & Lara on 08/18/10
Before you learn who Paul Henry is, you should learn a thing or two about the New Zealand network television programming landscape.
New Zealand has 5 non-cable TV stations (4 if you don't count TVNZ 5, which just constantly shows low-production-quality advertisements for regional restaurants and attractions). Between all of those channels is one good show, The Simpsons. It's kind of like American TV in those dark years between Family Guy getting canceled and reinstated. Couple that with the fact that you'll never see a baseball, football or hockey game televised here, and you might as well replace your TV with a box fan that sprays feces at you.
Google image search for "feces fan" produced this irrelevant but hilarious gem. Try searching yourself! Then delete your browser history.
There are a small number of especially horrible shows. For example, Noise Control is basically a Cops-style show where "noise patrol officers" (not actual police) respond to noise complaints in Auckland. Another one is What's Really in Our...?. It used to be called What's Really In Our Food?, but the marketing geniuses at TVNZ3 realized that there are some really weird and possibly gross sounding (demographic dependent) chemicals in non-foodstuffs like shampoo and lotion. And to top it off, they have possibly the worst nature show I've ever seen:
Where did they find this guy - Spatula City?
So the entertainment TV sucks. But I (Adam) hardly watch it anyway since I work during the day and slave away at this shitty blog at night. The only program I consistently watch is the morning news which conveniently airs while I'm housing cereal and hydrocodone on the couch before work. And in these several minutes of peace, I'm forced to stare at this asshole:
This is Paul Henry, Asshole.
First off, he's not really a news anchor, he's a morning show host - the Regis of the South. After an actual journalist reads the news, he sits there and gives his opinion on it. Unsurprisingly he has an opinion about everything - which doesn't make him an asshole de jure, but just think of how many people you've met who have opinions about everything who aren't assholes. Occasionally he interviews people and asks them tough questions to get to the bottom of the truth, and for that I thank him.
To wrap it up, I hated this guy until I found this video of him commenting on one of his interviewees' mustaches. The interviewee was Stephanie Mills of Greenpeace.
Final thought: It's not funny when somebody is an asshole to you, but it is funny when they are an asshole to somebody else. Jim Saraceno calls this the Tom Green Poop On A Microphone Effect and completely disagrees with it, which makes it even funnier to me.
Swedish Rounding
by Adam & Lara on 08/12/10
In New Zealand they got rid of 1 and 5 cent coins awhile back, so the stores round to the nearest 10 cents on purchases. They call it Swedish Rounding. Everywhere else it's just called "rounding," except for Sweden where they call it "öresavrundning." Eventually the States will get rid of smaller denomination coinage and stores will implement rounding policies and they will probably call it "Freedom Rounding." And at some point after that somebody will move from the US to New Zealand and write a blog post about how funny it is that they call Freedom Rounding "Swedish Rounding." But the Swedes won't be laughing. No, not this time.
Nobody f*cks with the Swedish Rounding.
