The Non-Return Of The King

The wife has had her back surgery, hence the delay. This was all made more bearable by the fact that her beloved Bono has recently gone through the same procedure.

That voodoo doll has paid for itself. Twice.

Bono may be a strange, hypocritical little gobshite with a grossly oversized head, but his pain and misery has had a calming effect on the wife. The piece of spine that was removed now sits on the bookshelf preserved in vodka til we decide what to do with it. I was thinking of getting it made into a paperweight and making a present of it to the wife’s mum.

I travel to delightful suburb of Three Kings every day and was fascinated to learn that it was named after a collection of volcanic cones (actually four in number) sitting inside a much larger and shallower explosion crater.
Which really just goes to show that despite having a literacy rate of 109%, the understanding of maths here in Mordor is only 12%.
The area around Three Kings was drastically quarried over the years and now only one cone remains, mainly as it has a large water tank that was built on its summit at the beginning of the 20th century and is somewhat difficult to dismantle using tools for breaking into cars. Now known as Big King, it has been designated as a public reserve and will not be quarried. No matter how much it begs to leave the area.
Up until I read all of this I just assumed that the rest of the cones were stolen as the area is known for its high crime rate and scant regard for personally property. In the first week I started working there a work colleague went to the bank and was about to go inside when a guy in a wheelchair outside rolled up and advised her not to as it was being robbed by two armed men at the time. She fled the scene like a greased rodent but the guy in the wheelchair remained. It was probably the first entertainment he has had since his television was stolen.

Though I am some 7 months in to my time here and getting more accustomed to the Kiwi way of life, every day in Mordor I see or hear something that causes me to do a double take. Sometimes this is one of the collection of phenomenal mullets out in Three Kings, but more usually it is something on the quite bonkers media that catches my eye or ear. The other morning there was a caller dropping the F-bomb on a radio discussion and this language wasn't checked or apologised for by the hosts.

The caller then said “Shit….I just said “f*ck” there, didn’t I. Shit, sorry about that…”

Earlier this year we went to a fair at Mission Bay and one of the stalls was called “Finger Puppet Heaven”. I’m reminded of Demetri Martin’s wise words that the phrase “Finger Puppet” is only ok as a noun, but even given this, should children really be subjected to a stall where dead finger puppets abide? That just cannot be right.

Just as London has its Pearly Kings, Mordor has its Hubcap King. Whilst passing through one of the homelier (and by which I mean the kind of home that has a burnt out car on the lawn and police tape as a fence) areas of the city we passed a house that has the entire fence and some of the walls decorated in silver hubcaps of all styles. Not knowing if these were either stolen items displayed like a Predator’s trophies, salvaged from the road by the rest of the Maori womble clan or actually purchased for this very purpose, we stared in wonder before accelerating off into the night.

We then got out and checked the hubcaps were still on the car.