Cages, cars and drivel - but no penguins

First the good news. There is nothing to report on the penguin front this week. It would be too much to hope that the damned bird has died - we would have heard about that ad nauseam - but at least he is no longer bothering us on a daily basis. However there is news of some one with the same intellectual horsepower as the misplaced bird. The President of the Otago University Student's Association is one Logan Edgar. He is a tad brassed off that Union membership is to be made voluntary and not compulsory. Compulsory union membership, give me a break. He can obviously see his meal ticket going South (and you can't get much further south than Dunedin) and sees the Bill trying to get through parliament as a thoroughly bad thing. So what does he do? He decides to lock himself in a cage on the University lawn as a protest. It is quite beyond me what thought processes got him to the place where this would seem to be a reasonable idea let alone something that would change the inevitable chain of events that is underway - filibustering notwithstanding. In a proper world some one capable of such stupid thoughts wouldn't even get to a university let alone rise to hold some sort of office of influence. People like this should be gainfully employed flipping burgers. I hope someone loses the key to his cage and it is bloody cold.

Cars. When I first arrived in the Land of the Long White Jap Import I was a little bemused. Having come from Singapore where cars are compulsory crushed when ten years old I was appalled at the crap that was New Zealand's car stock. I'd never seen such rubbish. Someone explained the concept of the Jap Import and all became clear. The crap on the roads was there by design. The heap of junk in front of you with the 2011 number plate is in fact a cast off courtesy of Mr Takeda from Yokohama when he traded up to the latest Nissan Cedric. But they were cheap. You get what you pay for and New Zealand had decided that the best way to get around on our apologies for roads was to buy second hand crap that no one wanted in Japan. Over the years this has meant the country is full of rubbish cars. It would appear that all this will change a bit. In what may be the only good emissions standards legislation have ever bought to the country, any car built in Japan before 2005 will no longer be importable. Good. The bleaters (see yesterday's post) bleat that will put the price of cars up. Good. Or they will have to accept a 'drastic reduction in quality' in their purchase of tatt. I don't really see how this is possible but there you are. No, this is all good. The first steps to raising the quality of cars on NZ roads and reducing the numbers. Some people will not be able to afford the car they want bleat the bleaters. Tough, we want quality, not quantity. All we need to do now is get serious about improving the roads; some nice concrete ones, please.

A couple of weeks back we had a little taste of the mainstay of that Private Eye classic, Pseud's Corner. Regular perusal of the Herald will reveal a gent who deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award - William Dart. This plonker's supercilious grey bearded visage peers over his glasses at you three or four times week. I now read him just because it is so painful. His stuff is so bad it almost turns itself inside out to be good again. It's a bit like a coffee cup having the same shape as a doughnut; they both only have one surface but are totally different. No, its nothing like that at all but I'll leave it in as it is interesting. Monsieur Dart is the classical music critic for the Herald and is totally incapable of saying anything that means anything. One excerpt from his latest drivel will suffice. 'Although some piquant dissonances were not as sharply pointed as they might have been, Peter Scholes had a feeling for Ibert's throwaway, almost music-hall, humour.' Not a clue. And he does this again and again and again every couple of days. And he gets paid for it.

I've become a closet fan of Mr Dart and I have rumbled his ruse. Years ago he got drunk and cut up Roget's Thesaurus into so many one word pieces. He then put the shredded tome into one of those tombola machines and held a whole series of lucky draws. About forty prize winners per draw and the words were assembled in the order they were drawn into sentences and phrases. These were then stuck on pages of an exercise book. He carried on until he sobered up but his work was done. He now had all the classical music reviews he could ever need. All he has to do when Granny Herald wants the latest drivel is to photocopy half a dozen random pages from the master exercise book and he's done. Obviously pages are going to repeat on a fairly regular basis but this matters not as a) no one really reads it, b) if they do they've forgotten it faster than a unfamiliar phone number and c) who cares, anyway? Seven paragraphs on Berlioz? No problem, give me five minutes and I'll fire up the Xerox. Kaching - I'll take my cheque now please.

Off to buy a tombola machine.

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