Posts by Russell Brown
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i am chi.
You are a sweet but not unpleasant carbonated mineral water, flavoured with honey and kiwifruit and fortified with several Chinese herbs.
You are a key ingredient in New Zealand's greatest homegrown cocktail, the Falling Water.
Furthermore, you were once chosen as the backstage drink, from a selection of local mineral waters, by Sir Cliff Richard.
That's some mojo.
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So are you using Vulcan Mind Weld or Jedi Mind Tricks, serious investigators need to know and Murray wants some more.
It might have been the Vulcan Mind Meld I had later at Mighty Mighty.
Is you cat really called Canaille?
We don't talk about Agent Canaille.
Oh, and Sweden isn't evil, it was just drawn that way.
A nice Swedish couple stayed at our flat once. They knew the Swedish royal family. Perhaps I have a suppressed memory about it.
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sorry russell, until we have incontrovertable proof that you are not a mind-control pawn of the labour government we will no longer believe you.
Che, if the Wellingtonista couldn't get that information out of me with the use of a maitai served in a pineapple (banned under the Geneva Conventions, I believe), do you really think I'm going to blurt it out to you?
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The fact that you sat at an outdoor table at SPQR doesn't make you a celeb. It makes you a poseur.
It makes you a smoker.
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Is "move to Sweden" the modern day equivalent of get thee to a nunnery?
You misunderstand. Sweden, because of its high rate of family intervention, is officially the Dark Kingdom. Its first-in-the-world performance on "Health and Safety", and "Behaviours and Risks" in this year's UNICEF Innocenti Report on Child Well-Being in Rich Countries is of no account.
Sweden is Evil. Helen is Evil. Timaru Lady is Joan of Arc.
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Oh and FYI Russell ...
Thanks. I left a comment.
I continue to be amazed at the loyalty this woman commands.
Dave's a nice enough guy, but I would have thought he'd have left the cult after considering the stark differences in the story she told him about the incident last year and the account of the witness. They are not the same.
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"...If they needed to fly to Los Angeles to do a piece to camera in front of a building, it seemed, they just did it."
Any particular story in mind?
Yes, but I damned if I can remember what it was. I just recall sitting in front of the TV wondering how much that piece to camera cost.
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"Eventually, it might even allow countries with lots of trees and relatively few people, such as Sweden and New Zealand, to grow their own fuel rather than import oil."
It was an interesting take on the issue, bascally criticising US subsidies on corn for ethanol as emphasising the worst sort of biofuel.
New Zealand's bio-resource potential is actually quite startling. We have more reasons to grow trees than just Kyoto.
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when TV3 arrived and they felt some odd need to, you know, compete. TV One didn't ever need to compete, it just needed to be TV One and hold it's head high, a la ABC and BBC 1.
One key thing they did, which has come back to bite them on the arse, was deliberately create a celebrity culture. People who had once been announcers and journalists were pitched to the women's mags as celebrities.
It was counter-productive in the long-term: it did nothing for the quality of news and current affairs and it helped create the runaway salary inflation of the early 90s - in 1993, 1994 and 1995 - when, as Gordon Campbell revealed in a great Listener story, TVNZ failed to re-register under the Companies Act. That meant it didn't report on salaries - and that records of how and why pay packets fattened apparently simply do not exist. During that period, salaries - and not just amongst presenters - went through the roof:
The point being: the salaries paid to top presenters at TVNZ have come under fire from all quarters in recent years, most notably from then-TVNZ board chairman Ross Armstrong. Certainly, presenter salaries did rise sharply during the 1990s, despite the fact that New Zealand's television "market" for their wares has only two major players. Far less attention has been paid to the interplay between presenter salaries and top executive salaries.
At the very least, according to TVNZ sources, the presenter salaries served to validate the pay rises that were taking place concurrently among the executives. Around the world, this was a period when massive pay packets were almost de rigueur, serving as self-validating symbols of potency for the senior executive class. Although neither simple nor direct, a linkage does seem to have existed. After all, TVNZ itself told Parliament in 2001 (see supplementary question 10, TVNZ Financial Review 1999/2000) that "internal relativity" was one of the main factors guiding how the company's Remuneration Committee did its job.
Basically, they all thought National was going to sell TVNZ, decided they weren't public broadcasters and awarded each other huge salary increases. Jesus, some bad decisions have been made in the place.
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I used to be a Copywriter, who had to deal with TVNZ way back. I'm not a journalist, but from what I know (very little), the culture is just plain wrong for any kind of innovation or suggestions for it.
This is actually why I'm inclined to give the current management the benefit of the doubt. With TVNZ ondemand, they had the idea, planned and shipped it inside eight months. And it didn't suck.
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