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This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- after all, I doubt even the most liberal amongst us would advocate that it's a good thing to have free and ready access to material such as kiddy-porn through the Net.

However, I certainly hope that those of us who use the Net never find ourselves saddled with the outrageously prudish attitudes that seem to be pervading more mainstream media.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination. 7

I refer of course to the Advertising Standards Authority's decision to ban the screening of the very Toyota ad that so many Kiwis found to be extremely funny and entertaining -- so entertaining that survey in March found it to be the most popular ad on TV during that month.

For those who don't know what I"m talking about, it's the one where the husband and wife engage in a bit of grossly overstated violence in order to try and be the first into their new Toyota RAV 4.

For the life of me I can not understand why this ad was pulled following the complaints of just 17 people out of the total viewing audience.

In upholding the complaint the ASA said the ad was "offensive and malicious", containing an excessive level of domestic violence and issues of safety.

Well, to use a word that Toyota also had trouble with "bugger me" -- how stupid is that?

Once again we have officials telling us that we're all too stupid to distinguish between the actions of actors in a TV ad and real life. I for one am grossly insulted by this insinuation and I suspect you should be too.

But what about kids? Perhaps they'd find it hard to distinguish between these ads and reality?

Well the ads aren't targeted at kids so they don't usual screen at a time when young children are watching TV without adult supervision so what's the problem?

You only have to spend an afternoon watching kids cartoons and the outrageous levels of violence they contain to realise that, by comparison, the Toyota RAV 4 ad is very tame. Just watch an episode of Itchy and Scratchy as depicted on The Simpsons and you'll see what I mean -- is the Toyota ad really more violent than that??

Which also brings us to another bit of authoritarian stupidity and perceived animal cruelty...

A New Plymouth school is in the firing line after a teacher allowed pupils to despatch a possum by dealing it a blow to the head with a hammer.

Do we want possums? No, of course not.

Is a quick blow to the head a humane way to kill such an animal? Yes it is.

What's wrong with the school overseeing the destruction of a creature categorised as a serious pest in this way?

Well, if you're from the local SPCA you spaz out and go postal over the whole thing, making totally unsubstantiated claims that the child who dispatched the pest would probably start attacking family pets in the same manner. Utter gutrot!

How long are Kiwis going to stand for all this molly-coddling?

Surely something is badly wrong when a group of .000425% of the population can lobby a tiny handful of bureaucrats to ban a TV ad because they assume the rest of us have trouble telling humour from reality?

Surely something is also wrong when people get into trouble for doing the nation a favour by humanely dispatching one of the greatest threats to our flora and forna?

If this is a portent of things to come then we should all be very, very worried about the outrageous power that so few can wield. If things keep going the way they are it won't be long before we start seeing greater controls on our Net access (filtering web-proxies for instance) and more state control over what you can and cant watch, do and say.

If we don't wake up to this and start complaining then really we deserve what we get. Are the bureaucrats right? Are we so brain-dead that they have to make our choices and decisions for us -- or are we still able to think for ourselves and speak out when we're being treated like children?

What say you?

Look who's in the news (again)
Gosh, some stories just never die eh? Look who's got a mention in this story running across many of the world's newswires.

Yes, my interestingprojects website, phone and email box have been running red-hot, with lots of overflow to this column (aardvark traffic up 500% yesterday). Don't you wish you'd been sponsoring the site already :-)

Requests for interviews from the world's media are already coming in and I'll be getting up even earlier this weekend to fit in with broadcasters' chedules. Get in now and I could wear your logo or brand in the next round of TV interviews that will doubtless be screened around the world.

Did you notice
As eagle-eyed readers will have noticed, sponsorship of this fine blog/column is up for grabs.

Those who have already made enquiries about sponsoring Aardvark should hear back from me this week - and anyone else who might like to do so should drop me a line ASAP.

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