I no longer get the Herald at Marmite soldier time and my reading of this waste of trees is now somewhat erratic. Didn't glance at it at all yesterday. Or so I thought when I picked up what I thought was today's edition only to find myself wading through Monday stuff. The cunning ratbags have stopped colouring the Green Pages and so I tripped unwarned over an item about an American Walking evangelist.
This has every ingredient a looney left weird beard story could hope for - you couldn't have made it up better. This nutter (a walking guru, no less) is pictured striding down Auckland's streets clad in one of those jackets that has a million external pockets telling the world you are either a wannabe fly fisher or a very keen photographer. To be fair I think he was the latter in an earlier life. He is accompanied by his wife who looks very earnest and tofu powered shod in sensible shoes. Fruitloop has been bought to NZ by Land Transport New Zealand to lead seminars and address the national Walking Conference in Auckland next week. We have a national Walking Conference? I bet that's a thrill a minute. Seminars on the relative merits of starting a stroll with the left or the right foot. Breakout session on blisters. The trade exhibition with vast selections of shoelaces. Can't wait.
I'll quote a few things this bloke has already said mainly when speaking to the Waitakere Council - what a surprise. They are in no particular order and I don't know which of them is the most stupid.
"I personally am delighted with the price of oil - I couldn't be happier." I fail to see how anyone can say that. Oil (and all forms of power come to think of it) should be free for God's sake.
"Cars made things so easy in the early days that we didn't focus on rebuilding our cities, so only now are we beginning to realise how important that focus is." Now that doesn't even make any sense from a grammatical point of view let alone being totally unfathomable. First motor car was built in about 1905 or so and I'm pretty sure man had some pretty sizable conurbations by then.
"I think we are going to have Victory gardens, and people saying: I'll start with one day a week without the car, within a month go to two days without it and then, by the third month, I'll figure out some shift in my lifestyle where the car is now the luxury - it's not the necessity."
So he's really lost it. Victory gardnes? My Dad used to tell me about these. Featured in the same stories were gas masks an Anderton Shelters. A day a week without a car? Well you can sod off, sunshine. If you think I am walking from Dairy Flat to Takapuna once a week you can think again. And regarding a 390 bhp supercharged 4 litre V8 as anything less than one of life's essentials is the sort of thinking that gets you taken away by the men in the white coats.
Anyway there is loads more of this tosh but the general thrust is that we should all give up our cars, walk everywhere, become healthier, happier and the planet will be saved as a by product. This is coming from an American for heaven's sake. Have you been to America? You could no more use a pair of stout boots as your primary mode of transport than he could have walked from Seattle to Auckland - there's the small matter of the Pacific Ocean in the way if you care to consult a map. All American shopping now happens in malls about twenty miles out of the towns and these shopping paradises are surrounded by car parks the size of a small country. In case you hadn't noticed, Mr American Fruitloop, your mob lives in their cars.
So we have to put up with being lectured by some Septic who has been flown here in a gas guzzling 747 at my expense (he's being bankrolled by tax payer money) on how we should start walking everywhere. I don't think so.
I would suggest Mr Looney Walkalot walks to Cape Reinga and just keeps going.
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