Lex and Big Tom in Auckland City

What you wouldn’t do for a little bit of cash ?

Let me start by saying that I’m a big survivor fan and I think the show is really well filmed and edited. I like the format, and find it interesting to watch and analyze their political alliances. I actually remember watching the whole season of survivor Palau, with my brother, in two days. That’s right, we watched about 6 hours of it on a friday (went to bed at around 5am), got up and watched the last bit of it (for non-survivor fan out there, that means at least 7 more hours of it!). I also remember liking Lex a lot in the Palau series because I liked his style, his ideas about friendships and was (secretly) hoping he his head at the right place (still am). It must be incredibly hard to deal with the amount of pressure from the media and the ‘fans’, don’t get me started on the whole reality tv show fans, that you face when embarking on a show such as survivor. So why am I so bummed to see Lex and Big Tom come to New-Zealand to signed a couple of autographs ?

Well I have to step back a little and give you some background here. In New-Zealand, there is something called the “Armageddon Pulp Culture Expo”, which is basically a 3 day expo that has comics, trading cards, computer games, an art competition, an animation room and companies such as Gotham Comics. Yeah, so it’s basically a 3-day fantasy camp where you can dress up as your favorite fantasy character and get to meet other people (and sometimes famous people!) who are interested in the matter. It is attracting quite a lot of people, 28 000 peoples this year in Auckland, mostly kids and teenagers, with the odd adults here and there. This year they had a table of ‘celebrities’ signing autographs for the crowd. Nothing wrong with that …. when it’s free! The catch was that you had to pay 30$NZD to get an autographs from them. And so if you didn’t have the dough, then you had to just walk by your favorite celebrity and wave good bye that famous signature you oh-so-wanted cause you can’t pay the 30$NZD. And so I found it quite disturbing that a celebrity, some of them less well known and not as right as we would think I guess, would show up to an expo like this and ask kids to pay 30$NZD for an autograph. I am hoping that the money they made went to the expo at least and not their personal bank account… at least some people were there to sign for free, which is great!

On a better note, a month ago guys like Andy Irons (Last year world surf champion), Sunny Garcia, Joel Parkinson and Occy, who are guys I would definitively pay 30$NZD for their autograph were here in Auckland signing for free outside the Billabong shop on Queen St. Now that’s a classic! Good on ya guys!