Well nothing has changed; the paper remains drivel. Front page is dominated (banner headline, two pictures and about 70% of the real estate) by a restaurant booking. Christchurch is about to be totally uninsured (more of uninsured in a bit) and the main news is a table for 30 down the Viaduct. And a picture of the PM snogging his wife in front of the Taj Mahal (the real one and not the restaurant). And a picture of the bloody penguin. The froggy rugby team have booked a restaurant every night for a month and this merits a headline superscript, in red no less, of 'Rugby World Cup Boom'. Unless they are paying a couple of million a night for the frogs legs and snails I would have thought 'Boom' is overplaying the hand by a large degree. A nice little short term earner for the purveyor of victuals but hardly the sort of financial investment that will pull the country out of the poo.
John Key and Mrs PM in India playing the tourist. Leave them alone. I welcome a newspaper giving tidings of the PM persuading Tata to reduce the price of Jaguar servicing but I have zero interest in what he does out of office hours with 'er indoors.
The bloody penguin. Who is paying for all this cute crap? Now I don't wish to appear heartless (well I couldn't give a big penguin's backside if I do actually) but the stance from all concerned when this obviously stupid bird turned up thousands of miles from home should have been 'Oh look, there's a big penguin'. When it started looking less than the full shilling the best line of attack would have been 'Daft bird ain't looking too flash, never mind there's truck loads of them where he came from, he shouldn't be here and he's about to die. Never mind' This should have been followed by doing absolutely nothing. But what do we get? The damned thing is taken to a zoo, has 'experts' opining on what is in its best interests and then has an endoscopy performed as a tourist attraction. Best interests. Penguins don't have interests, best or otherwise. They are birds. They eat fish, live in a horrible, cold place and reproduce so that their progeny can eat fish and live in a horrible, cold place. The aren't interested in anything. They don't collect stamps, do macrame or restore vintage steam engines. Having some weird beard DoC chap opine as to their best interests is arrant nonsense. Suppose this geographically displaced animal was an anaconda wot ate people and not a cute (sic), fluffy penguin. Would we be having the same 'best interests' tosh? I think not.
Would we have same unpleasant serpent being endoscoped in full public view as a warped freak show by one of my colleagues? Of course not. Now I have to be very careful here because the bloke what done the deed really is a colleague of mine and I have experience of endoscoping a penguin. I did the deed in private (as, to my mind, befits this sort of thing) with a finite and attainable therapeutic goal. I think yesterday's effort ticked neither of those boxes. We should move on.
Uninsured. I Tweeted incorrectly last night that the Aston Martin that was nicked in Auckland yesterday was a DB9. I assumed this because of the quoted price. I didn't (still don't) think a V8 Vantage would set you back $300,000. The owner got his very tasty motor back after a few hours after offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to its return. He is very lucky as he obviously has the intellectual horsepower of the already discussed penguin. The car was uninsured and I originally thought this to be an act of commission rather than an error of omission. I am now less certain as he left it with the keys in the ignition and a laptop and $500 cash lying casually around in the interior.
I'm sure this bloke could be easily persuaded that he needs an endoscopy just to ensure he hasn't swallowed any twigs. I'd do it for him for, oooh, $10,000
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