Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Housekeeping | Mar 07, 2006 10:14

Service post: Feel free to vote in the Netguide Web Awards (I guess we'd be in in Best Blog and Best Media Site if you felt kindly towards us). And Nic Jones is the runaway leader on the Public Address Virtual Super 14 board - there's as big a gap between him and Ross Hawkins in second as there is between Ross and the next 24 places. There were a couple of big movers this week, and some new players, including the infamous Jimi Kumara. Now, go and read the other posts …

Digg this Scoopit!

Three Things | Mar 06, 2006 11:52

Hey mate. No, not you … him. Yeah, you. Is the most profound and constructive way you can find of expressing your New Zealandness really entering redundant data on your census form? Why not read a New Zealand author? Write something yourself? Go to the beach, do the garden, watch rugby, cook food, whatever. Your choice. Go wild, Kiwi.

Yes, you're a New Zealander. Me too. We all are. And we could all write in "New Zealander" under the ethnicity question. In which case, there is no point in continuing to have such a question. But that would be dumb. The ethnic makeup of the country is precisely the kind of data that a census is supposed to reap. Doug Myers can celebrate our "remarkable homogenity" in this meandering, contradictory bit of dinner-party fluff, but the fact is that we are becoming more diverse, and it is useful to know about that.

I'm deeply interested in national identity; I even edited a book about it last year. I've had the experience, common to so many New Zealanders, of travelling to, and living in, Europe - and realising in short order that I'm not European. I'm of the Pacific.

But for goodness sake, the "New Zealand European" option on the form is just shorthand for "New Zealander of European extraction", isn't it? I'll happily answer to that. I'm actually quite interested in it, particularly in my maternal line, the Saurbreys, who moved from southern Germany to Denmark (where they still seem quite plentiful), and thence to London, where they anglicised to "Saulbrey" and then headed out for the new world more than a hundred years ago. On the other side of the tree, I've had special feelings of heritage sitting on a misty hill in Scotland. I know where I'm at - but I'm proud of where I came from.

I could, of course, enter some mix of German-Danish-Scottish-English on the form - you can claim as many ethnicities as you like and all are accorded equal weight - but it really doesn't seem necessary. If the same people bitching about this year's census form hadn't nagged it into removal, I'd be happy to tick "Pakeha". But mostly, I'm a New Zealander. Of European extraction.

I see the marijuana-being-laced-with-P story aired on 20/20 has now turned up in the Central Leader and the Herald. I'll believe it when it actually makes any sense.

Pure methamphetamine costs $1000 a gram. At the most broken-down street level, marijuana sells for $15 a gram, tops. I'll grant that it's possible that the odd gang may have tried spiking dope with P and selling it as "supergrass" or something (lord knows marketing has been a key driver in the P plague), but the idea that it is being sold to unknowing kids to get them hooked on P seems plainly silly.

Contrary to popular belief, users don't actually "smoke" P. They gently heat the crystals in the bowl of a glass pipe and inhale the vapour that comes off them. If they heat them too strongly, the crystals burn and are wasted. I guess crystals smoked in a joint would have some effect, but it would be an extremely inefficient process.

You'd probably have to put $30 to $50 worth of P in a $20 bullet to produce a reasonable buzz, and then it would be gone. P addiction doesn't work like that: it's based on a near-fetishisation of the smoking device itself, and on going back for another hit, then another, and then back to the dealer for more. Including it unadvertised in marijuana would rather seem to defeat the point.

I wonder if this is really another round for the old urban myth, from two decades ago, about dealers putting heroin in marijuana to recruit new addicts. That didn't make much sense either. But this is a topic on which people can pretty much say what they like and have it reported unchallenged. Witness Campbell Live recently giving screen time to an ex-cop who made the provably ludicrous claim that more New Zealanders now smoke P than marijuana.

And finally … David Benson Pope has been arrogant and deceitful in his handling of accusations about his time as a teacher. The actions themselves do not seem particularly wicked (and the fact that a former pupil who claims to have been slapped on the leg with a ruler one day in German class is saying she'll go to the police is simply surreal) but he has misled the House and by rights should be gone.

But Labour has decided to hang tough, and was hugely helped in that strategy last week by the lack of common decency displayed by Benson Pope's tormentors. Both Rodney Hide and National's Judith Collins used Parliamentary privilege to call Benson Pope a "pervert". Hide also called him a "dirty old man". To say such poisonous characterisations are not supported by the evidence is putting it mildly. There is probably no worse accusation you can make against a man than to baselessly call him a paedophile - and that is what both Hide and Collins did.

The fact that Collins used a cute rhetorical device to deliver her smear only made it worse. The smirk on her face as she got up to wallow in the sewer last week was one of the nastiest things I can recall seeing in our Parliament. In seeking to lay waste to Benson Pope's character, she has revealed something about her own.

Digg this Scoopit!

Four Strange Men | Feb 27, 2006 10:37

For all that we've been deluged lately with pronouncements about speech, free and otherwise, this clip might actually be the best thing I've seen all year. The late Frank Zappa deadpans his way through a 1986 episode of CNN's Crossfire dedicated to the scourge of obscene pop music. I hate Zappa's music, but gee he's good on this. It's a 50MB QuickTime file from some mouldering VHS tape, but it's really worth the download.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has an excellent interview with another kind of oddball: Nick Cave, who wrote the script for the new "brutal Australian western" The Proposition.

And the undeniably odd Prince Charles is in the gun - again - after court action to try and stop the Mail on Sunday publishing further extracts from a private journal he wrote at the time of the Hong Kong handover backfired horribly.

Charles presents as a hapless Eeyore figure, and he may well be the most luckless litigator of his age, but he'd make a lovely columnist for the Spectator. He writes as who he is: his thoughts on unexpectedly finding himself in Club Class en route to the handover of Hong Kong ("Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself") are really quite bleakly funny.

I'm in the minority, I'm sure, in believing that his former wife represented something I don't like - the manipulative attention-seeker - but rather liking Charles. I find his pronouncements on architecture and genetic engineering a bit tiresome, and the Guardian's ticking-off of him is doubtless well-warranted, but, still, I rather like him. Go figure, as those dreadful Americans say …

And finally, demonstrating that there is apparently no length to which modern Britain won't go to regulate personal behaviour, London mayor Ken Livingstone has been stood down for a month and made liable for £80,000 pounds in costs for being "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive" to a journalist in the course of what he presumably took to be a private conversation.

Livingstone was bailed up by Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold as he left a party a year ago. Presumably, he'd had a couple, because he compared Finegold (who happens to be Jewish) to a Nazi war criminal. This is the transcript, as recorded in Livingstone's Wikipedia entry:

Finegold: Mr Livingstone, Evening Standard. How did tonight go?

Livingstone: How awful for you. Have you thought of having treatment?

Finegold: How did tonight go?

Mr Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment?

Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you?

Mr Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?

Finegold: No, I'm Jewish, I wasn't a German war criminal and I'm actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?

Mr Livingstone: Arr right, well you might be [Jewish], but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?

Finegold: Great, I have you on record for that. So, how was tonight?

Mr Livingstone: It's nothing to do with you because your paper is a load of scumbags and reactionary bigots.

Finegold: I'm a journalist and I'm doing my job. I'm only asking for a comment.

Mr Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that doesn't have a record of supporting fascism.

So Ken was a bit of a cunt. But that much has been obvious to his nation for a year; presumably some voters will take it into account next time. But, as various people are pointing out, for a panel of three unelected officials to remove a democratically elected mayor is bizarre and unhealthy.

PS: And despite scoring 42 points this weekend, and climbing 27,504 places overall, I remain irritatingly just outside the Top 10 in the Public Address Virtual Super 14 Leader Board. Nic Jones continues to enjoy a healthy lead, and those two promising young broadcasters, John Campbell and Wammo, dwell yet in bottom-five ignominy. Oh woe! (BTW, I think I've missed adding a couple of people who wanted to join our board - if that's you, can you drop me another email to remind me?)

Digg this Scoopit!