RWC 2011 - a flag's point of view

I suppose we had better give some mention to this. If you live in the Land of the Long White Sporting Hype you would have to have spent the last fortnight under the Long White Rock to not have noticed that the Rugby World Cup is taking place. Big event, sure, and I am enjoying selected games on the 100" screen. I have not wasted my time with most of the games so far despite the breathless enjoinders of the spinmeisters employed by the organisers. USA vs Russia for example was billed as the 'continuation of the cold war'. In New Plymouth. Tarankai's most famous aviator, weatherman Jim Hickey, is hardly Gary Powers. All this bollocks does not disguise the fact that USA vs Russia is going to be crap rugby and so, apparently, it turned out. One of the teams won (there hasn't been a draw yet) and I neither know or care which it was. I have little enthusiasm for watching any of Romania's games and noted in passing that England looked very ordinary overcoming Georgia. Last night, not five kilometres from Obald Acres, South Africa took on Namibia. Shall I go? Tricky one but after much soul searching I decided not to bother shelling out North of $150 to see a 87-0 drubbing. But you wouldn't know that was the score before the match, you may well say. Well, yes I did. I certainly knew the 'nil' bit (it might have been three or even five - it matters not) and the larger number was going to be greater than sixty and then who cares.

Must admit I was quite tempted to get a ticket for NZ vs France at Eden Park tomorrow night but at $400 a pop it is back to the home theatre at a time when I am normally watching the Saturday evening murdering.

What is in full swing, though and what I am quite enjoying is having loads of cars running around with little flags attached to the windows. About $5 a pop apparently and some cars have multiple embellishments; two common and four not unusual. Vast majority, of course, are All Black flags and depending on where you drive in Auckland second are South Africa (on the Shore where I do most of my driving), Tonga or Samoa (South Auckland). Very few Aussie flags. Some are really inventive and have two countries up - generally the ABs and the country of the driver's origin. Lots of scope for inventiveness here. Two different flags and do you put the ABs on the driver's side or the passenger side? Four flags - two each side, different front and back or, my favourite, diagonally? Not really been tempted to go for car flags for either of the Jags but I must admit I quite like them.

But what do we have in the Herald this morning? Some sour faced Plod 'reminding' people that the flags must be securely fastened to their cars or they may face 'criminal charges'. Wowser on steroids and you can just fuck off.

No, the World Cup is going to be good when the real stuff starts in a couple of weeks. There has been one 'upset' to date which was Ireland upsetting the Wobblies. This has to be the most welcome result of the tournament so far for most Kiwis and will remain so until the ABs give France a seeing to tomorrow. It also gave rise to the best bit of public display of team support I have seen thus far. Flags - good, face painting - naff and so yesterday. But last Sunday night I met an Irishwoman who had an Irish flag in nail polish on every one of her ten digits (she might have done her toes as well but I was not forward enough to ask her to remove her boots). I thought they might have been transfers but she assured me they were all individually painted. Very nice.

I'm off to try and find a Yaapie female similarly decorated - now that would be impressive.

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Grumpy

Same old, same old. If you want to know what is in this post, just read what was written three weeks ago. I am again in the darkened skies somewhere over the central North Island when I should be wiping the sleepy dust from my eyes in Christchurch. It is again the hexagonal crystalline form of the water molecule that has caused the problem. Very nice tickets on NZ 543 and NZ 484 generously purchased by the New Zealand Tax payer have been consigned to the bin to be substituted by a NZ 401 to Wellington which still insists on taking off at 0600.

I really have had enough of this disruption to my work. As it was three weeks ago we have the nation going gaga over Jim's polar rodent. Usual pictures of snowmen and even an idiot in Dunedin running around in the snow wearing shorts. When quizzed about this totally inappropriate dress code he said he was an impoverished apprentice and couldn't afford trousers. Plonker. And liar. This winter nonsense is worse than last months. We had a bit of snow in Auckland which apparently makes things even cuter. Wrong. Yesterday they had snow falling on The Terrace in Wellington (where I am currently heading) and this was further cause for wonderment. I'm sorry but this is all peripheral to the point that all this bad weather is a pain in the arse. I lived in Singapore for many years and not once did I lose a day's travail to snow.

To compound my grumpiness I am baled up in 1E for the next thirty five minutes with most of the vastly overweight Member of Parliament in 1D oozing into my little part of the 737-300. When I get to the 'Winter Wonderland of Wellington' (quote from no less than the Prime Minister) I have a day of putting out strategic fires stretching in front of me. Almost all of these are being started by idiots occupying positions that require levels of skill way beyond their feeble capabilities. A few of them think they are the best thing since lace up shoes and I am quite looking forward to disavowing them of this notion. Others are so far up themselves that they couldn't be found with a search party. Happy times. And there is the other thing to which I vaguely alluded a few days back. Sod it.

Cheer myself up with a flick through the Herald in there Koru Lounge prior to departure? Fat chance. Pages and pages of Winter Wonderland bollocks to be followed by a quarter page on a foot and cycle crossing for the Harbour Bridge. PIcture of the simian grin of the Auckland Mayor gleefully announcing that by a vote of seven to four council has decided to authorize someone to look into possible budget sources for further study of the stupid idea. And we waste food on these fools.

No life is not all beer and skittles at the moment and the only slight pleasure I can currently feel is that of wallowing in my own misery.

It'll pass.

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Weather is bad and needs to be punished

I long ago learnt not to get upset by things over which I have, and can never have, any control. However the bloody weather is giving me a run for my money at the moment. I like to be organised and because of this my travail away from the paddocks around the house run like a Swiss watch. I have over the last year learnt that Mr Gantt had two things going for him. He had a seriously odd name and he knew what he was doing. I could never have made the progress I have over the last fifteen months without some of the rudimentary basics of project management. I run to a schedule and love it. I, for the first time in my working life, have a number of synchronized Get Things Done lists on all my various electronic aids to an existence and they all have timelines. Sounds nerdy, but it works.

Thus, months ago, it was decided that today I would work in Christchurch for the day and then catch the early evening flight to Wellington to be in time for the weekly pub quiz. That is how you do things; meticulous planning. In order to get a full day in ChCh we will arrive the night before and sod the seismic risks. Then tomorrow we have things to do in Wellington and then its back to Obald Acres. All ship shape and Bristol fashion like what it should be. When those two days work are done it ensures that next week is teed up nicely. And so on. All mapped out and charted on one of Mr Gantt's bits of paper through to mid October. Perfect.

Then it bloody snows. And snows and snows and snows.

Worst cold snap for sixteen years the media breathlessly inform us. As if this is something to be celebrated like a couple of batsmen (not batters, please) breaking New Zealand's opening stand record. A winter wonderland the 6 o'clock news gushes forth. Pictures of kids making snowmen, drunk students throwing snowballs and frost on seven wire fences. Just to pretend they realists the media show a few obligatory pics of rubbish drivers getting no traction and sliding rear door first into ditches, a farmer or two in his blue overalls and RD1 beanie dishing out hay to cows and the winter landscape is complete. We cross to some reporter at a ski field who finds someone to say their takings are up on last week when the piste was so much mud and then more pictures of kids tobogganing on tea trays in lieu of going to school. Cross to Jim Hickey who tells the terminally stupid that we have all this snow courtesy of a blast of cold air from the Antarctic running into a moist atmosphere (no shit, Sherlock). For the nth time this winter he calls this a polar rodent and entreats the denizens of Middlemarch to repair to the log box. Back to the studio to interrupt one day of winter with the news that the United States is broke and there is a nutter shooting people wholesale up where all the snow should be.

Cold snaps and snow are not cute and cuddly. They are a pain in the arse. They have disrupted my carefully organised Gantt view of the next three months. I should be in Christchurch now and I am at 30000 feet somewhere over Taranaki. The only similarity between the two is that it is as dark up here as I'm sure it is down there. And just as bloody cold. I will be in the Wellington office far too early; but at least the Coffee Nazi will be open. I am very grateful to the Air New Zealand Gold Elite hotline for getting me on this flight at fourteen hours notice after they said that even all the Gold Eliteness I could muster would not get me on a flight to Christchurch today, but flying at 0600? Please. But I've learnt something already this morning. The Auckland Domestic Terminal does not open until 0500. More bloody disruptions to my comfy routine in having to hang around the McDOnalds (hell, I hoopoe I wasn't spotted) for seven minutes waiting for security to open. I will now spend most of the rest of the morning trying to fit the work I am not doing today into next week. And that will mean that next week's stuff will have to find a new square on Mr Gantt's sheet of paper . And. Well you get the picture.

I've always hated snow. It is cold and wet and just plain horrible. I have never seen the attraction of skiing either. It is cold, wet, you have to wear expensive stupid looking clothes and you break things - like legs and arms and stuff. Today I think I hate snow more than anything I can think of. Mr Gantt doesn't like it either.

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Odds and ends from around NZ this week

Saturday morning pre dawn Stygian gloom and its pissing with rain. Therefore golf is right up there with sticking pins in one's eyes, there can be no agricultural work around Obald Acres and I'm at the beck and call of the damned telephone for forty eight hours. Enforced indoorsness means one of two things; do some preparatory work for next Monday and Tuesday (has to be done and a bit dull) or repair to the barn and apply the HSS to free machining steel (infinitely preferable but should really wait). The next two days do not fill me with much enthusiasm.

Random thoughts on the week. Rotorua really is very smelly and I can't imagine why anyone would live there for that and a few other reasons. The sulphurous nature of the atmosphere has other downsides in addition to the assaults on the olfactory apparatus. I had to stay in Rydges Rotorua which is the most bizarre hotel in the southern hemisphere. The first peculiarly Rotorua affliction is that all the bright ware (taps, towel rails etc) are so tarnished by the aforementioned air that one is afraid to touch them in fear of getting contact dermatitis. The rooms are inappropriately vast with a five minute trek from wardrobe to chaise longue. The furniture looks to have come from a second hand store in Ngaruwahia and the atrium restaurant is crap. Stay there in the winter and you have to tape up the door to the spa room to stop all heat from the puny in room heater disappearing into the sulphurous outdoors and stay in the summer and you are told to tape up the windows to stop flies getting in. No, a nasty hotel in every way. Mercifully staying somewhere else in a couple of weeks which cannot be worse - I hope.

Then when the time comes to mercifully exit Rotorua you go to Rotorua International (sic) Airport. I think it gets the flash International appellation courtesy of a flight a week to Sydney. Didn't see the duty free shopping mall that International Airports pride themselves on in order to fleece the punters. In lieu of this Rotorua has joined the other nasty New Zealand Airports (I'm looking at you Hamilton and Palmerston North) in charging a development tax before you are allowed to escape over the perimeter fence. This really pisses me off as I can't see it ever being used to develop a really poor airport. The biggest downside of this transport hub though is not the airport's fault. I have a lot of time for Air New Zealand (good grief I spend enough time with them every week) but the lack of a Koru Lounge in Rotovegas is a national disgrace; get it sorted. I am back in three weeks and I expect, nay demand, Kapiti smelly cheese and Kaitaia Fire for my tomato juice to be in place by then.

Christchurch and Wellington next week. Both are prone to more seismic activity than I would like. Had a palpable tremor in Wellington a couple of weeks back but was ensconced in a suitable earthquake proofed building and all we got was a rather diverting swaying of the leaves on the office pot plants for fifteen seconds or so. As nothing compared to the ongoing disruption in Christchurch where the number of quakes since September 4th last year is now well over seven thousand. One night for me and when I requested a single storey hotel next to the airport the predictable response from my travel agent was 'That is what everyone wants'. Still, the denizens of Christchurch want in for what I am up to despite being given several opportunities to back out, so the least I can do is front up. Thoughts on the shaky city later in the week.

Back in Auckland and we find that after two days of clear skies in my absence normal service has been resumed and its raining. I know one shouldn't complain about things about which one can do nothing but it really does rain an awful lot in Auckland in the winter. I would not like to be one of my sheep having to spend the weekend in my bottom paddock where the ovine residents have just now been joined by a flock of ducks. The birds would be more at home than the woolly ones at present. My mowers (all four of them) will think I have found a new object of weekend affection and ones whole life takes on a seasonal dampness.

The enforced time indoors for the weekend means I can indulge in playing with Apple's new operating system as an ersatz excuse for not doing any real work. It was revealed this week that Apple has more cash than the GDP of 126 of the world's countries. Not really comparing like with like, I know, but it doesn't disguise the fact that they have serious amounts of dosh. A portion of this which probably equates in percentage terms to the sort of money you and I wouldn't mind losing down the back of the sofa has been spent on OS X Lion. They are getting a bit short of large feline animals for the next one. We've had, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and now Lion. What is next? Ocelot? Cheetah? - not a good commercial name, I would suggest. Cougar? - vide supra. Bornean Clouded Leopard? - that one really trips off the tongue.

I quite like Lion, but then it is only a computer operating system and not the meaning of life. For openers the price was right - free. I timed the purchase of the 27" iMac with this in mind but for $0.00 I got a new shiny operating system on all three of my Macs. The only downside was the 4Gig download throttled my broadband back to dial up speed for 24 hours as it exceeded Vodafone's 2Gig per day cap. Now what is that about? They should reward you not penalise you for big downloads as it means you are using their service more and potentially giving them more dosh. Non comprende.

This minor irritation turned into a major one, however, when I lost all phone line (hence Internet) connectivity to the rest of the planet during a storm. This occasioned a call to Vodafone's Help (sic) Line. Now these are an easy target for opprobrium but all of it is deserved. I am unsure whether the female at the other end was physically in New Zealand but she certainly was not a native of Te Kuiti. Call VF on the shoephone (obviously) and we get past the mother's maiden name stuff. 'How can I help you?'. I laudably refrain from 'I suspect not all' and tell her my land line is down. 'If the problem is inside your house it will cost you money'. 'I know, but the problem isn't inside my house as next door has no land line either' 'Are you in Auckland'. Again, supreme self restraint stopped me from asking her the same question. 'Can you disconnect your phone from the wall socket?' 'Well of course I can, it is a very easy technical manoeuvre, but why would I want to do that?' 'I need to see if the problem is in your home'. Deep breath. 'I believe I told you about next door'. 'But I need you to disconnect the handset' A bit of cruelty now - why not? 'But all my handsets are connected to the land line through a PABX'. This did not go down well. My new friend had to contact her supervisor as to the next move which I suspect was finding out what a PABX was. 'You have to get your telephone engineer (hang on, I thought that was your mob) to check your PABX before we can troubleshoot'. 'Stormy weather, next door - any pennies dropping yet?' And so it goes on for three quarters of an hour. Eventually this automaton agrees to log a fault only after I have agreed to sell my first born if the problem is not outside the confines of Obald Acres. And we pay an arm and a leg for them to do this to us. All's well that ends well as service was reconnected in about eight hours (although Miss Te Kuiti would only commit to 'between 24 and 72 hours') and the engineers sent me a couple of texts to say the deed was done. A minor irritation in an otherwise entirely agreeable rural existence.

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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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A penguin on Jetstar?

Easier pickings this week as the Herald meticulously documents things that don't matter whilst on the other side of the world another organ of the press has a chance of bringing down a British Prime Minister. To be fair Granny does give this a fair bit of syndicated coverage deeper into the rag but not before we've waded through pages and pages of drivel.

The bloody penguin won't go away. He now has a name (and no, I won't demean myself by telling you what it is) and 'could soon move from his hospital room to a pool retreat'. He's now gained weight - aren't you so relieved? We know he's a he because the damned thing had its DNA profile run. Apparently you don't sex penguins by just looking at the naughty bits but you put a dollop of blood into a PCR machine. Again, who is paying for all this crap? The nation is now committed to looking after this ornithological millstone until it mercifully dies. And that won't be allowed to happen until its been to Penguin Intensive Care during its final illness. The decision to turn off life support will have to be made at cabinet level and its eventual demise will be followed by national mourning, hand drawn cards from primary schools and shedloads of hakas. I sincerely hope we don't have to have a penguin update next week.

Auckland's transport seems to be getting more space on this blog than it deserves recently but there are two stories of note juxtaposed on A7. There is a picture of Plod (hi viz attired, naturellement) ensconced under a motorway bridge with a video camera. He is there for yours and my safety, of course. Is he, bollocks. He is there so that as well as give you a fine for jumping a red light, talking on your cellphone or eating a pie whilst driving he can cane you with demerit points. Nasty, nasty stuff. Why isn't he out catching the bad men.

Just below this there is 'Ask Phoebe'. This is a sort of Agony Aunt for Auckland type thing. My first questions would be 'Why did you let your parents give you such a daft christian name and why did you not change it by deed poll as soon as you were able?' Anyway someone has asked our fount of all metropolitan knowledge 'How do you best get on the north bound SH1 from the airport?' We are talking how do you get from New Zealand's largest Airport onto its main trunk road. One would hope the answer would be along the lines of leave the passenger terminal, get in the left lane and take the slip road onto the six lane highway. The real answer from our Phoebe? Follow SH20 to the Sandringham Rd exit (at Mairo St), go down Sandringham Rd and turn left into Mt Albert Rd. Continue along here as it becomes Carrington Road, and then left into Gt North Road. This will lead you to the Pt Chevalier onramp to SH16 citybound. Head towards the city and take the Northern Motorway offramp to SH1 North. I'm serious. There is no bloody hope for a city that has infrastructure like that and I'm saving up for a helicopter.

Front page complete with a picture montage of four picturelets is a follow up of the chap who had a leak all over a Jetstar flight to Singapore. He widdled all over the show and on a passengers scarf (got to keep warm when in Singapore) in particular. The scarf owner is rather brassed off about the whole thing. I would say she got what she paid for by flying Jetstar. As usual on a Tuesday I am typing this in the Auckland Koru Lounge and Jetstar have already cancelled their first flight of the day to Wellington. The phantom wizzer is the son of New Zealand's netball coach which apparently makes this non story the more news worthy. I don't think so. If I were the chap involved I would be keeping my head severely down and certainly not holding press conferences. This all happened a couple of weeks ago and if he had just STFU it would already be today's fish and chip paper. He says he he's very sorry (well he's not going to say otherwise) but he can't remember anything of the incident. There is a side bar to the story where a sleep researcher talks about a condition called parasomnia where you do things in your sleep with out realising it. Bollocks. Why don't we just stop all the talking nice. He was as pissed as a ferret and couldn't find the change to operate the Jetstar 'Pay as You Widdle' in-flight toilets.

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A16 to the rescue

A regular, if even only weekly, go at The Herald might prove to be harder than first anticipated. I really should not be surprised as it is a very poor newspaper with a level of journalism that struggles to reach mediocrity. Occasional guest comments from overseas columnists are a welcome oasis in this desert of rubbish but there is not even that treat today.

Front page has a shock horror story revealing that if Auckland wants a second harbour crossing it will have to be paid for. The hideous notion of a toll with people who want to use a new flash bridge or burrow paying for the privilege is termed 'absolutely outrageous' by a member of the Kaipatiki local board. Although the Kaipatiki Local Board is hardly on a par with US House of Representatives in the world governance league I'm afraid this fool's view will have a similar impact on this matter as she is a) a wimmin and b) has a name which would indicate she is not a white middle age anglo saxon male. Give her a disability and strong evidence that she bats for the other side and its a shoe in - a nice shiny eight lane bridge over the harbour will fall out of the sky for no money 'cos some stupid woman from Birkenhead thinks it will be unfair for a piece of infrastructure to be provided in any other way.

This sort of attitude is hamstringing this country's progress. All this bloody sense of entitlement and fairness. Do we need a second harbour crossing? I haven't a clue. But there will be ways to determine whether we do. They will involve some clever chap doing all sorts of economic modelling and there will be an answer at the bottom of the page. We (the Auckland Council or Central Government - who cares?) will have to pay for this advice. If the advice is any good it won't be cheap - send the bill to the stupid woman in Kaipatiki. Then if we do need a bridge or tunnel just build the bloody thing. Sod the endangered newts and native ferns, get the big yellow machines in and get on with it. It will be eye wateringly expensive but thems the breaks. Why not pay for it with tolls? What is wrong with that? Silly woman says that people cannot imagine having to pay $60 week to cross the bridge to go to work. Idiot. Either move, get a new job, or, much more likely, use the existing bridge which will obviously remain as free to cross in the future as it is now. Infrastructure projects are bloody expensive. User pays ticks all the boxes to pay for them.

While we are speaking transport there is a stouch between the Auckland Transport chairman and central government. In a previous life the Transport bloke was chairman of some other Council and drew up a very spiffy (in his opinion) regional transport masterplan that stretched into the distant future with us all speeding round the region like the Jetsons. Central Transport minister has looked under the bed and found the cocoa tin less than overflowing with folding varieties and has told him in Auckland that, at $2.4 billion, plans for railways all over the show are not on. I suppose it could still be done if the silly woman from Kaipatiki pays $1500 for a return ticket from Birkenhead to Albany. But that is not going to happen as it is absolutely outrageous to pay $6 to cross a new harbour bridge that will also cost eight figures. The Auckland transport wallah labels this entirely sensible bit of pragmatism from Wellington as ' Government undermining city rail plans'. Well I should bloody well hope it is - that is what it was elected to do.

Where is Pseud's Corner when you need it? I had pretty much given up on the paper and was fast forward to 30 secs of trivia with Sideswipe and was distracted by a) a picture of a woman pushing a pram wearing hi viz track pants and, even more nauseatingly, b) a theatre review.

This piece of pretentious crap almost deserves reproducing in its entirety so you can get the full flavour of nausea that can be induced by the use of a word processing program. Janet McAllister is the author - just so you can be sure never to read anything else she writes.'This effective and moving one-woman play by Arthur Meek seems at first to be simple linear storytelling based on the diaries of the wife of New Zealand's first Chief Justice...'not a great start, but she's not even up to flying speed. 'But in the end its an angry sad reminder that "the colonialists didn't know any better" is a false defence for the Crown's appalling treatment of Maori' - Maori spelt with the funny thing over the 'o' so that it is an authentic representation of the language that never had a written form. A bit early in the day to have great waves of nausea pass over one especially so soon after the Black Doris plums. There are nine paragraphs of this drivel. Want some more? 'While she symbolically takes off her elaborate Victorian garb, she's taking off a cage she was never enamoured of anyway' All the better to walk around clad in a piece of bark presumably. 'The mighty (eh?) Auckland Theatre Company production is rather overwhelming for a chatty piece....'. 'Tony Rabbit's (seriously) monumental forest of metal ladders is set on sand within the confines of the stage - lighting turns them imprisoning or freeing by turn -and we hear John Gibsons' rythmical water, cutlery and tea-stirring sounds as appropriate'. It's unmitigated drivel written about a production that sounds a hundred times worse.

I bet Janet McAllister lives in Birkenhead and would think it impinges on her human rights to pay to cross a new bridge over the harbour.

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Weeks End

Friday night and what to report?

A few amusing occurrences over the last couple of days mostly in the world has gone nuts category. Internationally the choosing of North Korea to Chair a UN Committee on nuclear disarmament is right up there with putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank. Only a dysfunctional mob like the UN could have their 'have to be fair to everybody' method of selection throw up one of the world's pariahs and not turn a hair. What is wrong with saying 'We can't have North Korea as they are both a bad bunch of ratbags and as mad as a box of frogs'. Selection is apparently done alphabetically and it obviously matters not whether the country after Switzerland for chairmanship of the United Nations Alpine Mountain Rescue Committee is Syria. Antigua and Barbuda taking over from Antarctica as Chairman of the United Nations Committee on Ice Bergs will raise not a single eyebrow in New York. Pack of Monkeys the lot of them.

That New Zealand can show nutty tendencies is part of the charm of the place. A bit of book banning over the last couple of days. Never a good thing. The book in question is apparently about some waste of space of a woman who has a degree of probably justified notoriety. I couldn't care less and won't buy the book. And there is the rub - if I don't want it I won't hand over the Ed Hilarys. No need to ban the damned book - if you don't want it, don't buy it. There is certainly no need to get all nasally dislocated as to whether a shop will sell it or not. There is even a Facebook page with in excess of ten thousand 'friends' (sic) calling for the book's author to be burnt at the stake.

Which brings us nicely to the Reserve Bank, they who issue the Eds. Not a place that interests me much except that its building is opposite my Wellington place of employment and is next to the emporium of the Coffee Nazi (who bye the bye I reckon is a good bloke). Well the afore mentioned Coffee Nazi must have been slipping something a little extra into the espressos bound for No 2 The Terrace as they are considering redesigning the bank notes. Ed and Kate Sheppard are to be traded in for other worthies. I never see bank notes of denominations greater than a $10 so I have no idea who adorns the rest. Maybe a bird of some ornithological sort on the green one - that's a $20 isn't it? Can't imagine who they have in mind as replacements. The Mad Butcher? Richie McCaw? But why change them at all? I can't imagine it would be a cheap exercise with all the designing, new flash plasticky paper stuff etc all for something that really doesn't need doing as the country isn't exactly flush at the moment is it? Silly.

As a bank note aside, I won one hundred trillion dollars a couple of weeks back in a Pub Quiz. That's $100,000,000,000,000. Gave up work on the spot, bought a different coloured DB9 for every day of the week and moved to Hawaii - which I had just bought. Only slight problem was that the note was issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and is apparently worth about 35c. Looks kosher enough though as I gaze at it on my desk. Oh, and it has a picture of three rocks, a buffalo and a waterfall on it. I'll stick with Sir Ed, thanks.

A dilemma. I missed Pink Floyd performing the Wall when it was being toured properly back in the eighties. I was in Singapore and it never came there. Never saw the Gerald Scarfe cartoons or the Wall being built. Missed the only proper reunion when they did four songs at Live 8 in 2005 and obviously Dave Gilmour, Roger Waters, Rick Wright and Nick Mason will never play together again because Rick Wright has joined Syd Barrett in being dead. When the band imploded in the mid eighties I was always on the side that Roger Waters was not supporting. I obviously don't know the bloke from a bar of soap but I don't like him. He just seems to be not a very nice bloke. On the other hand Dave Gilmour has long ago had a decent haircut and put on the amount of weight commensurate with his eye watering wealth and advancing years. In the same totally irrational way I have written Waters off, Gilmour appears to me to be alright; the sort of bloke you would have along to win squillions of dollars in a Pub Quiz (except he doesn't need the money and probably doesn't do Pub Quizzes). So here is the dilemma. Roger Waters is bringing The Wall to Auckland next summer. Toad or not Waters wrote a good deal of The Wall and it is bloody excellent. Do I buy a ticket and put my probably ill founded dislike of its main performer behind me? It won't be the Floyd but will it be close enough? Or do I just go and put Pulse on the home theatre, turn it up to warp factor twelve, frighten the sheep, be glad Waters ain't there and do without Gerald Scarfe again? Decisions, decisions.

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Granny Herald

Many moons ago when this blog was not a blog but a series of posts on a fishing website its raison d'etre was as a commentary on what passes as a newspaper in Auckland. I thought it might amuse to return to my roots as on Tuesdays I am in the Auckland Koru Lounge pre dawn and the paper is free. This could turn into a regular Tuesday spot. Who knows? Or cares.

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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