Posts by David Haywood
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Southerly: This Week in Parliament: 26…, in reply to Paul Brislen,
Ah, the power of the internet… look at that.
Fortunately we had our This Week in Parliament biennial editorial board meeting at lunchtime today – and Russell and I were able to push through your recommendation.
To be honest, some of the board members were rather confused about the difference between testicles and scrotums, “So which one is Mike Hoskings then?” asked one bewildered board member, but Russell was heroic in steadfastly campaigning for the change.
As Russell so eloquently and movingly said in his speech to the board: “If we don’t have our facts exactly 100 per cent correct in This Week in Parliament then we have nothing. I urge you to put aside your differences and vote together for scrotum. ”
Many of the board members were in tears by the end of Russell’s speech, and the motion was carried 254 votes to 2 against.
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Oh, that's a real shame - he made an excellent contribution both to politics and parliament (he was effectively leader of the opposition for most of last term).
Although I have always felt that -- as taxpayers -- we somehow weren't getting our full money's worth with only the single 'L' in his Christian name.
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Ah yes, well you are technically correct – although I note that Dr Smith is an actual doctor, and feel I must defer to his medical terminology (however inexact).
At any rate, I have taken note of your point and will raise it with our editorial board…
Perhaps the incorrect terminology was what so traumatized Miss Spong.
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Our 88-year-old stenographer, Miss Spong, tells us that she’s been “permanently traumatized” while preparing the transcript for this week. Nevertheless she managed to get it ready even more quickly than usual. What a trouper!
We wish you all the best with your ACC claim, Miss Spong (although we understand there may be regulations that prohibit making a claim while in prison).
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Thank you, Jimmy! Great reviews - really like how you analyse why a movie is good, rather than just regurgitating the plot as reviewers so often do. It's given me some very tempting leads for my catch-up movie watching...
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Southerly: This Week in Parliament (in…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Woah, Nelly -- what an extraordinary combination of coincidences. Of course, if you'd actually tried to deliberately burn down your house then it wouldn't have lit all all (2LT).
This deserves to be a guest post, really...
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And in case you missed the photo in Ian’s link, here’s Sir George’s impressive Totalisator in Sydney (click on photo to see full size image).
P.S. And apologies for the delay in replying to the comments on this thread (once again, Ian Dalziel writes a comment cleverer and funnier than the original post) – had long day of intense activities with my wild children yesterday.
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Oh, and in correcting my original LibreOffice document, I see that it autocorrects ‘Totalisator’ to ‘Totalizer’.
No doubt John Armstrong would have noticed. That’s the difference between a political journalist with 75 years experience in the gallery – and me with a handful of engineering degrees and a broken-down stenographer whose main claim to fame is a criminal record like a roll of loo-paper.
Mind you, we do give you all the hard facts here (albeit sometimes misspelt). Not like some ‘proper’ political journalists in some Auckland daily newspapers who take a germ of fact from a press release, and pad it out with 999 words of complete and utter opinion.
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Southerly: This Week in Parliament (in…, in reply to Evan Yates,
Totalizer or Totalisator? ….or have I missed the punchline? There is probably a truss-flange involved somewhere.
Well fucken hell – thank you Evan Yates! Yes, there are devices called totalizers in engineering for calculating the total amount of various things (of which the TABs totalisator is an example), but it turns out that Sir George had to be a clever wanker and give his invention a slightly different name. Had he no thought for the reputations of future political journalists?
And here was I thinking what a good job I’d done on this column – working in Foreskin’s Lament, Hicksville, The Denniston Rose, Heart of Coal, Point that thing, Twilight and My Favourite Martian, etc. I mean, you don’t get that from John Bloody Armstrong in Granny Herald. And written while repairing a wardrobe; not to mention typed out in 15 minutes.
But then Sir George goes and ruins it all by his clever-clever spelling. What a bastard! Well, I hope you’re happy with yourself, Sir George. You make me sick!
(Hugely embarrassing misspelling now corrected – thank you, Evan and Ian).
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Our 88-year-old stenographer, Miss Spong, has asked me to thank all those who sent Christmas gifts to her prison cell. Unfortunately she remains on remand as a consequence of an incident in which a guard was 'shanked'.
Despite her trials and tribulations, Miss Spong valiantly managed to submit her transcriptions to Public Address the same day that she was released from solitary confinement. What a trouper!
