Keeping up with the Kontentsphere

Has another week passed you by with nary a fleeting glance at the weird and wonderful world of online content? Get the goss with another handy installment of Keeping up with the Kontentsphere.

NZ BIRD OF THE YEAR VOTER FRAUD

With the general election still not resolved but many of us having lost interest, it is finally time to think about a far more important democratic decision: the NZ Bird of the Year competition.  

Many worthy native birds are up for the prize and with over a week left, it's still anyone's guess which lucky feather-friend will emerge the victor - or IS IT?

Reports of voter fraud have emerged, with Wellington-based statistical analysts Dragonfly Data Science detecting a suspicious spike in votes for the white-faced heron. Upon closer inspection, it emerged that over 100 votes for the heron had come from the same Christchurch based IP address, disguised by the use of a random email generator.

With a strict one-vote-per-person rule in place, all but one of the votes were discounted.

"We're not angry”, an NZ Bird of the Year spokesperson told Stuff. “We're just impressed they were able to do that and they care enough about a bird to do it."

As am I.

DOM BOWDEN ON THE PROWL

Looking for love but just CAN’T FIND A GUY WHO HAS IT ALL? Well, stop what you’re doing: New Zealand’s most eligible bachelor is ON THE MARKET.

Not only could you be the lucky lady to wed and breed with the NZ version of Ryan Seacrest, he has a car and can get you free bags (presumably from his brother’s brand Deadly Ponies which, tbh, is not to be sniffed at).  

REALITY TV HOST! CAR! MARRIAGE! BABY! BAGS! Dom (provided this actually is him and not a strangely spot on parody) sure knows the way to a woman’s heart.

CLARKE GAYFORD'S MATE'S CAT

While Jacinda “patience of a saint” Ardern continues to wait to find out if she has to lead a country or not, her partner Clarke Gayford has been cajoling the nation as best he knows how: with a weird story about his friend’s cat.

Observing the cat’s strange behaviour the friend had begun medicating it for anxiety, until his own cat turned up and he realised he had stolen and drugged his neighbour's cat.

I don’t know quite why this is so funny but I think it has something to do with the gleeful satisfaction on the second cat’s face combined with the look of utter despair on the first’s.  

SEAN PLUNKET'S SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

There have been any number of bad Weinstein takes this week from men keen to demonstrate how chillingly cavalier they can be about decades of sexual abuse and harassment and New Zealand’s own Sean Plunket was no exception!  

The former TOP Party communications manager and newly minted member of the Broadcasting Standards Authority took to Twitter to execute what he later explained was a “social experiment” - one which apparently went exactly as he might have hypothesised - before deleting his account in a huff.

Did we all just take the bait and give ol’ provocateur Plunket what he wanted? Or, in a week where a shamefully high number of women were feeling rarked up by overly familiar accounts of workplace abuse, was it not at all surprising that little twerps joking in the corner didn’t exactly have us all in fits of giggles? We may never know.

VALERIE ADAMS BEBE

It was a bit of a grim week but something nice happened: Valerie Adams had her bebe!!

Lovely.