Bill Casey Column

AAP General News (Australia)
12-27-2000
Bill Casey Column

SYDNEY - January the first will feature me.

Full frontal. In the buff. Clutching a form guide. Bikini white where you expect bikini
white to be and and brown legs starting from under where my bowling shorts would be if
I was wearing bowling shorts.

The effect should be dramatic and put those Olympic type calendars to shame.

Calendars come into strength at this time of the year. Anyone who forgot to give anyone
else a present buys a calendar as a reserve gift.

It makes the giver seem up to date, so to speak.

The trouble is the nudity trend in calendar pictures. It's all changed from my day.

I can remember calendars with Churchill on them. He was January and General Thomas Blamey
was December. Other worthies who got us killed in wars were in between.

As a contrast, or in the way of variety, we would have nice pictures of flowers, or
even country scenes, but things, like the elastic in my shorts, have slipped.

Now we seem to have a desperate need to celebrate October with a full length picture
of the premiership football team captain with only his boots on, and even they are generally
unlaced.

Admittedly it's not as blatant as those girlie photos they always had in graages or
butcher's shops. Just over the till. You tried to keep from looking. It helped to keep
your eyes off the till too.

Can anyone explain to me why garage and butcher shop employees had more pornographic
instincts than other people.

The very basic principles of butchery perhaps, but what of the motor mechanics? Perhaps
they think a lot. Alone under cars. That sort of thing.

Be as it may, I will be about the only living thing that has not been viewed naked
by the end of the year 2000. Nude calendars are all the go and you only have to be able
to run a bit or be able to hit something with something else to be considered an ideal
subject for the nude photographers' lens.

The need to present oneself naked for the world to see is not new.

Streakers of all shapes and sizes have for years felt it necessary to run on to cricket
fields, football arenas and race courses to be pursued by the law and generally under-appreciated
by the public.

I often wondered whether the urge to display one's nether regions is controlled to
a major extent by the equipment with which nature provided us. For example if you happened
to be standing behind the door when they handed vital statistics you not likely to rush
forward at the first opportunity to divest yourself of all clothing and yell, "Look at
me, I have the smallest one in captivity".

Onlookers, particularly those adept at streaker watching, are inclined to be supercritical
to the point of nitpicking. Secretly they want to be like the streaker. Not you, the other
bloke. "Ye Gods, look at that. Why haven't I got one like that".

This is where the nude calendars puzzle me. It is the mystery of it all. They don't
actually show what they promise to show. It's left to the eye of the beholder.

Would Mr March, for instance, who is obviously a basketballer of distinction make as
much a appeal if his sport was table tennis.

The basketball is so strategically placed to cover his modesty, while the poor table
tennis champ has to make do with a ping pong ball. I defy him to display the same confident,
macho smile behind a ping pong ball.

But the take-it-off craze for calendar art is now so widely spread that even lady bowlers
feel the urge to drop their all whites so celebrate July.

Invariably we are told it is either for charity or the furtherment of the sport.

What encouragement, or whatever, the calendar buyers would gain by viewing the well
worn but worn well frames of the local lady fours champions is beyond me.

But taking a line through the ladies, I should sell well in the raw. My veteran frame
has suffered somewhat by the ravages of time but I have plans to brighten things up a
little with natural props.

The dog, a race book, my binoculars, or even a couple of six packs of beer should add
atmosphere to the pictures.

Mind you, I don't want to give the wrong idea, or even admit that I need props these days.

But I feel one must definitely go a lot further in the name of art than that ping pong
player did, for instance.

A nice shot of me patting the dog while holding a can in a strategic position would
be tasteful, particularly if the picture was taken from side on rather from the south
with me travelling north. That's not the dog's photogenic side for a start.

February could begin with a nice racy snap of me and the family. Naturally the family
would be fully clothed. Say helping me out of the shower.

I don't hold with any lack of modesty on the families' behalf and somehow I don't think
the wife would agree to a shot of us tip-toeing blithely through the tulips sans trappings.

No I will have to go this alone.

I should be okay in the summer months. But I dread the winter. That ping pong player
would have nothing on me in the winter.

The cold weather does terrible things to the male ego.

Have you ever seen a bloke streak in the mid winter cold?

Talk about having nothing to show for it.

ENDS

KEYWORD: CASEY ON THURSDAY

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