Public-art players and pantsless plonkers

As the long weekend beckons, it's time to take a light-hearted look at some of this week's quirkier news characters...

My Player of the week goes to someone who tried to foster a sense of play in others: the mystery prankster who cemented a seesaw into a Dunedin Council carpark.

When it was first found on Tuesday morning, officials assumed it had been done in protest against the council's new car parking strategy, which is widely unpopular.

The party poopers removed the seesaw (come on! Didn't they have a go on it first?), leaving a mystified city to guess whodunnit.

Later in the week a local newspaper received a letter from someone claiming to be "an arty-looking student in his mid-twenties". He took credit for installing a park bench elsewhere in the city last month and it's now believed he was the stealth seesaw suspect as well.

So what does it all mean? Well, according to him the public aren't supposed to look for meaning in his pieces - "you won't find them, you'll only create them".

I love random outbreaks of public artwork. Everyone needs some fun in their life and we owe guerilla artists like this one a great debt for the chuckles they bring. Well, unless you're a council worker I guess.


Plonker of the week has to be the pantsless twit who fell off a moving ute while drunk.

The man was one of two people standing on the back of the ute as it drove round town in Timaru on Sunday afternoon. In a moment of poetic justice, he fell off the ute as it rounded a corner and was knocked unconscious.

By the time an ambulance arrived on the scene, the man's friends had covered the lower half of his body with clothes. That's pretty decent of them - I know there are a lot of guys out there who wouldn't be so considerate and who would probably take the advantage to graffiti certain anatomical parts while he was out cold.

He was taken to Timaru Hospital and, not surprisingly, requested details of his condition not be released. I wonder if his mum's found out yet.


And a final award for Poetic Justice of the week - to nasty Nick Griffin, chairman of the extremely far-right British National Party. These xenophobic fellows want to stop immigration completely - as in, nobody allowed in - to fulfil their dream of an all-white Britain. Only 'indigenous Caucasians' are allowed to join their party. But they insist they're nothing to do with Nazis. Sure.

Anyway, Griffin caused a stir this week when the BBC allowed him to appear on its political talk show 'Question Time'. Hundreds of angry protesters stormed the BBC's offices, furious that he was being allowed to broadcast his fascist views. The Beeb insisted it had to be fair because other minor parties had featured on the show.

But was it all a plot? PM Gordon Brown had previously said that "I hope that the exposure of the BNP will make people see what they are really like." And indeed, when Griffin appeared on the show he didn't make any friends, facing a drubbing from a hostile audience. Oh, sure, more people know who the BNP are as a result, and maybe some grumpy old men cried out "Hear, hear!" from their armchairs - but on the whole it seems he's done himself no favours. I do love it when bigots hoist themselves by their own petard.

Happy Labour weekend, everyone!