Thursday, July 13, 2006

Syd and the plumbers

This plumbers, gasfitters and drainlayers thing is a rhum affair. I really don't know enough about it but only one side can be telling the truth.
Councils and their profligate spending habits are getting their deserved amount of newsprint. There is a Q & A type thing on Page 2 this morning. Now this is obviously open to a great deal of filtration and censoring but 'democracy services' crop up twice. Once when a bloke from Waitakere complains about the size of his bill and once when a bloke from the Hauraki Plains winges about being charged for street lights or similar. Both are told that they have to pay for 'democracy services'. These, apparently, are to ensure that edicts of central government are efficiently (sic) passed on to the proletariat and they are also paid to 'organise meetings' and....... Why, oh why, do we let them get away with this?
Poor old Syd. I knew he disappeared from the Pink Floyd line up very early on in the piece but was unaware of the depths to which had reached over the last forty years. Living with his Mum (nothing wrong with that of course) in Cambridgeshire popping down to Sainsbury's on his push bike. All the time raking in quarterly seven figure royalties (pounds sterling here) which Dave Gilmour ensured he recieved until the end. Very sad - many, many years ago I would have loved to have been Syd Barrett.
The comments page often has a piece worth reading as it often has a lot worth not reading. An article by Gareth George (I think) on the great NZ whining culture. All fairly light stuff but with serious undertones. He cites the case of the 'victims' (and there is certainly no shortage of these in this gwate country) of sexual abuse getting uptight about the adverts put up on lamposts advertising the free desexing of cats campaign currently running in Auckland. These fliers run along the line of 'A sex offender has moved in to your neighbourhood' and this, of course, is the moggy awash in reproductive hormones. Our 'victims' naturally find this very offensive and cause for re-traumatisation. Gareth also mentions the Vice President (and Treasurer) of the Featherstone Rugby Club who is going to lay a formal complaint to the Police about incitement to kill if the ABs use the new Haka again. This place is rapidly falling off Planet Commonsense. The point well made is that we, well you, are crying out for people to think for us and not have opinions of our own that might offend people. The Marxist Government of Aoteoroa seems quite happy to fill these shoes.
And finally today, Sideswipe which merits comment purely because I was mentioned in dispatches yesterday. The campaign to rid the world of the influence from Redmond is gaining a little traction with one bloke going to boycott Air New Zealand because of their descriminatory stance towards Macs. I don't have to do this after they yesterday announced that they were no longer going to fly to Singapore which is pretty much the only foreign place I want to fly to.

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