I’ve been having these weird cravings for hotdogs.

It may have something to do with the book I’m reading at the moment.

The protagonist is currently working as a hotdog vendor. He eats more than he sells.

I love hotdogs.

In this part of the world, when we say hotdog, we actually mean a deep-fried battered sausage impaled on a stick.

My people will eat anything, so long as it’s dipped in batter, then deep fried.

Chocolate bars, corn, penguins, baby Eskimos, Chihuahuas, 12-volt batteries… you name it.

But we would refer to the hotdogs the character sells -- the ones that come in a bun with mustard and sauce -- as “American Hotdogs”.

Well, we used to call them “American Hotdogs”.

Then in the mid-‘80s, we decided that we didn’t want to have anything to do with all that nuclear weapons madness.

So we declared ourselves Nuclear Free* and banned nuclear-armed, or even nuclear-powered, warships from our waters.

A policy that continues today.

The mighty American military officials didn’t like that.
Still don’t.

They cut ties to punish us and outlined over a gazillion retaliatory measures that they, our friends, would take in an attempt to force us to change our minds.
We were ostracized.

The Prime Minister at the time, Sir David Lange, summed the situation up best when he made his now famous speech at an Oxford Union debate, arguing that nuclear weapons were morally indefensible:

“… to compel an ally to accept nuclear weapons against the wishes of that ally is to take the moral position of totalitarianism, which allows for no self-determination, and which is exactly the evil that we are supposed to be fighting against.”

So after that, American Hotdogs came to be known as “Freedom to Decide Hotdogs”.

Freedom to Decide Hotdogs go nicely with Stupid Fucking Arsehole Prick Wanker Cock-Sucker Fries.

We used to call them “French Fries”.

How did the French repay us for fighting alongside them in two world wars?

First, they Piss Us Off by setting off a couple of hundred atoll-destroying nuclear bombs in the South Pacific.
Which is a long way from Paris.
But right in NZ’s back yard.
And you already know how we feel about nuclear bombs…

But it doesn’t stop there.

Then the Frenchies follow it up by sending secret agents to Auckland to blow up the hippy Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior.

There were 12 people sleeping on board at the time. One died.

The mission was personally endorsed by the French President, who initially pretended he knew nothing about it. The lying bastard in fact joined the rest of the world in publicly denouncing the “terrible act of terrorism”.

Stupid cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.
Don’t they know that the best way to defeat hippies is to make them wear a suit and tie?

Despite all that, we do actually love the French.

We love beating them at rugby.

And I guess they gave us French kissing. Which is nice.

We also like Americans, despite their uranium halitosis.

It’s just evil lying bastard American politicians and Generals that we can’t stand.

Down here, Those people are known as Americunts…

:)

* There is some irony in being nuclear free. The man known as the father of nuclear physics, was a New Zealander. But we don’t like to talk about that. Even though his face is on our $100 bill…

Of course, should someone like Antarctica ever decide to invade NZ in an attempt to claim our rich supplies of battered sausages on a stick (or “corn dogs”, as they may be known elsewhere), then we’re pretty much Fucked. With a capital Fffuck.

Our government decided that we didn’t really need an Air Force. So we did away with our ancient flock of F-16s.

Supposedly, we would instead now call on Australia’s jet squadron (located 1200 miles away) to help, should we need it.
But that help is conditional on whether we kick their ass in the rugby the night before.
So you can’t really count on those koala fuckers.
I guess calling them koala fuckers isn’t going to help matters much, either…

Which means that if Osama bin Liner hijacks a Boeing 747, the only option left for our Defence Force is to try and shoot the engines out. With rubber band guns. Cos that’s the most lethal weaponry they now possess.

Which is why rubber bands are classified as a restricted weapon here.
You can only buy them if you are a police officer, or in the military.

(Which is why, Last Girl On Earth, I’m having some trouble sending you a little something to add to your rubber-band ball collection. But don’t worry, I have my black market contacts on the job. Shhhh…)

Our navy isn’t much better.
Our best warship is essentially a big dingy with a harpoon gun attached.

The most action it sees is patrolling NZ’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone, to ensure deep-sea pirates stay away.

They’ve arrested Johnny Depp three times already, but they keep letting him go.
Cos he’s just so damn charming.

That, and he seems to be impervious to rubber band weaponry…