but I detect a growing groundswell of opinion that wants to do something about it.
Reluctantly opened the magnificent purveyor of opinion this morning and nothing has changed. Global warming appears to be flavour of the moment with a report coming out from Britain this morning that the bankrupt rulers of our lives seem bound to grasp with both hands as they have decided they are going to make 'climate change' as the new central plank of their existence. Forget the crime stats, forget the health service, forget the unsustainable drain on the economy that is the benefit system, we'll concentrate our minds (and my money) on something we can do nothing about. We are told that flying one kilo of kiwi fruit (why not bauxite or books or manure or bricks or All BLacks) to Europe generates five kilos of carbon. I am gobsmacked at the sheer inanity of such a statement. It is totally meaningles. It means absolutely nothing at all. Are we talking carbon fibre, a lump of graphite, coal, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ethyl lcohol (quite a bit of carbon in that) or what? Just a small example of the pseudo science BS that surrounds this entire subject. The headmistress has announced that New Zealand is striving to make a real difference in this srea - give me a break. One silver lining in all this though is that if Labour is going to put so much of its effort and credibility (sic) behind such arrant nonsense they are going to come an even bigger cropper than seems likely at the moment sooner rather than later.
Are we still only on page 2? Trees in Queen street are still makinng the paper below an article of RMA twaddle. Some building owners in Queen Street stand to be fined $40,000 for painting their shopfront incorrectly. The have painted the walls without highlightinig the pointing. No, wait a minute, without highlighting the pseudopointing.We also hear that there is an opinion that they should have got resource consent before even starting the work. The RMA, although probably well intentioned when it was conceived, has grown into a behomoth of silliness that is slowly strangling progress in this country.
My first trip to the comments page for a while and I am greeted with a picture of Bill Bryson. This has the desired effect in that it seduces me into reading an article that doesn't really merit such consideration. I quite like Bill's books; a good airoplane read generally. I try and gloss over the fact that an American writing about the English language ain't quite proper. The decline of standard of English is something that annoys me. The spoken word, a minor irritation. The written word in places that should know better really gets up my nose. I accept that all languages are evolving beasts, and I'll put my hand up to slipping in the odd split infinitive here and there, but I really shake my head in dismay at the barrage of TXT SPK that I am constantly exposed to. I have recently started texting, but only since I got a phone that has a QWERTY keyboard on it so I can punctuate my missives correctly without havig to go through five keystrokes for a comma. Any way, the picture of Bill is surrounded by an article by someone who is not Bill and who tries to base his argument on not being bothered about the difference between 'disinterested' and 'uninterested' because the difference has been eroded by common usage. I'm sorry but he's going to get nowhere with me with shonky thinking like that.
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