Once you have visited the BP, the only other thing to do in Paeroa is go to the big L&P bottle. This phallic monument serves the dual purpose of making the surroundings look kind of like shit and drawing tourists who have their photos taken in front of it.

The day we were there we got to see a terrorist group in action. If you are a resident of Paeroa you probably:

A) Hate the L&P bottle.
B) Hate tourists.

These old people have a good idea. Instead of harrassing the council with elegant handwritten letters they have taken to the streets with their luncheon and rolled down to the infamous bottle for a sit-in:

This makes tourists feel uncomfortable and therefore less inclined to want to take their picture in front of the bottle. Either that or it makes them mad that some wrinkly old people are going to be cluttering up their fckbk accounts when they post “mad nyeve fotoz we were drunk”.

I, for one, applaud these terrorists and their noble cause.

R&V was kind of horrible. Apparently The Guardian rated it the #2 place to be in the world after Paris for New Year’s Eve. If I cared more, I would probably go searching for some kind of reference.

But fuck, man. R&V was so shit I even saw some grapes that were having a bad time:

This is interesting because I thought the whole point of Rhythm and Vines was to stimulate the plants on the winery so they grew better. You know how if you talk to your plants, they grow better? Yeah. So, I was watching MythBusters and they did an experiment to see if that worked. They found that it did, and furthermore, the more stimulation the plants received (i.e. in the form of sound) the better they grew. The plants that were played death metal grew better than the plants the were played classical music (reference). Evidently R&V knew that a death metal festival wasn’t going to do very well in Gisbourne so they tried dub. When they saw that working, they decided to step things up a notch and get some heavier bands to play hoping to make up their losses from paying international artists with bigger wine sales.

Well, fuck your profiteering because your festival was shit.