Beige of Honor

Some decades ago followers of the New Zealand Men’s Cricket team were called the Beige Brigade. It was because they adopted the then predominant colour of the team’s uniform. And whilst many of those supporters enthusiastically accepted and embraced the nomenclature there were others among us who saw Beige Brigade largely as a derisory term, haplessly promoting that most colourless of colours largely confined previously to the underwear of women who have lost hope, interest or purpose.
 The men’s cricket team soon adopted different colours—pragmatically those of its principal sponsor—and beige was soon confined to memory, a few hapless souls on the Eastern Stand at Eden Park, most of the Canterbury Cricket Crowd,  and all of The Warehouse’s ladies underwear lineup.
That was until this week. This week we saw the color (sic) make an appearance—indeed a predominant and assertive fanfare—at the latest fashion show of the self-proclaimed doyen of fashion, music and presidencies, Kayne West.
Now, as everybody knows, Kayne West struggles for kredibility in most all facets of life. His marriage to Kim Kardashian first and then and his proclamation at the MTV Video Music Awards that he would run for the American Presidency in 2020 eclipsed even his calling his son North. It is foolish to think of Kayne West as anything other than a talentless Chicago rapper with an inflated ego that borders on the Messiah Complex. If you would like examples of musicians who succeed where West fails look to P-Diddy and Usher—they at least have creed.
So, why does Fryday even mention him? Only because I am starting to feel about “our very own” Lorde in the same way I feel about Millie Elder-Holmes and Caitlyn Jenner. In Millie’s case her over-exposure is not entirely her fault, but as predicted by Fryday on August 21 we had not seen the last of her; barely a week later she was in the media again displaying and espousing a very important commentary on societal mores and their role in making her a victim of that self-same society—in other words, her latest tattoo.
Neither is it Lorde’s fault that she is pictured in the front row of Kayne West’s show, only one seat along from Kim Kardashian. But she was and she was photographed and that photograph was promoted assiduously throughout New Zealand as if New Zealand, through Lorde, had suddenly found its place in the world, and was now widely recognised—even without a new flag.
Frankly, I would have been more impressed if she had been photographed next to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
But she wasn’t. She was there at Kayne West’s fashion frippery where he unknowingly, and she knowingly, evoked and endorsed an image and colour that New Zealanders, seemingly with the sole exception of Lorde, have long forsaken and which today is treated much as an embarrassment.
OMG!
Lorde wears beige!
Tell me it is not so.
Lorde help us.

Going down in the last shower

It is said that one can successfully dampen one’s rampant sexual desires by taking a cold shower. That may well be true, though I am yet to see or seek credible scientific evidence of it.
Nor do I see, at this aged time of life, a need to dampen sexual desire.
Quite the reverse.
However, there may be those who find it helpful—among them, those committed to a celibate life, those for whom any form of sexual desire is a moral affront and a personifestation (sic) of the male subjugation and objectification of women (Waikato University Women’s Studies) and anyone living at Gloryvale.
For the rest of us, attempting to stem rampant desire is a most often needless and, more often still, impossible exercise. One would have to give up watching Game of Thrones, for example. Or find some other rationale for the existence of Kim Kardashian.
So, it is with mix of sympathy and empathy that we read in this morning’s Herald of the couple whose car rolled off the end of Birkenhead Wharf last night and into the Waitemata Harbour—with them in it. Fortunately, no-one was injured and the car and couple were successfully recovered.
Now, there may be any number of reasons why car and couple were parked up on Birkenhead Wharf at 9.00 at night. The couple say they were about to go for a walk—a most laudable vocation. There may also be reasons the car decided to go for a walk of its own—the police say it may have been the hand-brake taking a break.
But forgive me for opining that a more “amore” scenario would have been that ardour was such that a handbrake was kicked, and chance and circumstance and car collectively decided that a cold shower was called for.
So they provided it.

Kim

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To me, having an innate aversion to a name is irrational and illogical. Yet I have it.  In my early days the name was Felicity. But at least I could explain why I disliked Felicity—I disliked Felicity. Felicity Smith was a girl who followed me in every primary class we attended. She latched on to me like a limpet and it was only when we went to separate secondary schools that she stopped. Felicity was never popular and was as a consequence lonely and morose—which only added to her problem and in retrospect my own: the guilt I now feel for the way I treated her which ran along the lines of I don’t want to be associated with you because you are bad for my image.

That said, I still have an aversion to the name Felicity. But at least I have an explanation as well.

But how do I explain Kim? Why do I not like the name Kim? Is it again that I associate it with the traits of some people I do know of that name though not intimately—Kim Kardashian, Kim Dotcom and Kim Jong-un? Maybe.

I am such an evil devious bugger that I even went on the Internet to find other people named Kim whom I could dislike. What I found surprised me—not the number of people, but the number of sites devoted to the name Kim. There is of course the omnipresent Wikipedia listing, but there also any number of sites listing famous people named Kim (they all seem to come up with the same three I did) and one site for “Men named Kim”.  There is even a site for people who wished they were named Kim. For those of a scientific bent there is a Web-thesis on the gender-neutrality of Kim.

None of these sites adds much to the store of common knowledge but they perhaps illustrate the fact that you can find anything about anything on the Internet, and that there are too many people with too much time on their hands. Like me.

I will now go and do something useful.  Before I go, however, there are some riders to this Fryday. They are:

1.     I know very few people named Kim.

2.     The only Kim with whom I have a close acquaintance is one of the loveliest people I have met and of whom I have the greatest admiration and adoration.

3.     None of the other Kims I have mentioned have invited me to any of their parties (in the case of Kim Dotcom he seems to have invited everybody else) and thus allowed Fryday to form a different opinion of them. Until they do…

And finally...Felicity. My hope there is that she has grown to live a full and happy life.  That won’t assuage my guilt, but it will at least allow me to think she has the strength and the depth to smile benignly and knowingly on my apology.
Happy Valentine’s Day Felicity, wherever you are.