Posts by Rob Stowell
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Speaker: A Slight Diversion from…, in reply to David Haywood,
so big-budget that there’d be no chance of it being made.
This seems cheap, really – maybe not the full budget? And the quality … I tried, but couldn’t watch more than ten minutes here and there …
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After an unattractive period of gloating, I'm finding the depth and scale of this mess dispiriting. National deserve to be thrown out of office. If they're not, we'll all struggle to regain our balance, our sense of who we are.
And we'll be in for 3 years of horrible partisan scrabble.
But deep down I want National to lose because they've lost the battle of ideas. Instead they seem destined to go down in a muddy clusterf&ck of selfishness and meanness. Inquiries and commissions won't take away the sour taste, the sad waste. -
My father and an enthusiastic friend built a ferro-cement dingy one afternoon on the beach at Purau.
We dug sand to build up the shape, a board across the stern, some chicken-wire, and we mixed and scraped and smoothed cement over it. My not-perfect memory is that it cured fast enough to be moved before the tide came in. Dad fitted three boards for thwarts, and rowlocks, and we launched it.
It floated. Even with three people aboard.
On the other hand, it rowed very poorly, due to an unnoticed irregularity in shape. Rather than dance over, it plowed through waves, giving the uneasy feeling that the slightest bit of slop could send you to the bottom.
And it was possibly the heaviest dinghy of its size in the world. Four adults could barely launch it.
After a season of intermittent use, it became the basis, I believe, of someone’s mooring, which was fitting.
I’ve never quite been able to love any ferro-cement boat since. (Apologies to Harold and Loxley, which looks lovely. I’ve fancied the H28 since a teen – Herreshoff is a legend.) -
More generally, the PM appears largely successful in his 'left-wing smear campaign' smear. That ties 'Dirty Politics' with 'F#%k JK' and effigy-burning (not smears, but who's questioning it) as well as 'Kill the PM' and 'Shylock'- and associates them with 'the left' eg Labour, the Greens, IMP, and most of us PASers.
A journalist needs to sit down - sympathetically - with the PM and say, "let's talk about this left-wing smear campaign - who's running it, and what nasty lies are they spreading?"
If you unpack it, there's no credible connection between these things (thus no campaign), and not much you could credibly call a 'smear'. If we don't unpack it, it becomes a central part of the election narrative. -
Go James! (And Stephen:))
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Hard News: Didn't see that coming, in reply to Alfie,
in almost every case the story is written after the material has been shot.
I've worked with one, but only one, journalist who regularly did this. Watching him-or-her coach talent to try to get just the grab he-or-she had pretty much already scripted for was embarrassing.
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I'm hoping everything Key says forever, some cheeky journalist is going to earnestly ask: "When you say you're off to Palmy in the morning- is that you you or the PM's office off to Palmy? Just to be sure I've got this straight."
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Hard News: In The Green Room, in reply to Bart Janssen,
every panelist I’ve talked to has said they could fund twice as many grants with no loss of quality and all the grants could easily be doubled in size with no loss of quality.
Yep. It’s woeful how many great projects don’t make it- or get a grant, do great science which raises more questions and exciting new avenues- which then don’t make it.
I don't like the model. But before trying to construct something else, doubling it would be worthwhile. -
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Pete George,
Many and probably most people just see all parties and politicians generally as dirty players and liars. The degree of dirt and the number of lies matters little to them.
And that doesn't worry you? Fine. That makes you part of the problem.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Susi Maclean,
From what I see, it’s the way the game is played, by all sides, and I am not confident there’ll ever be anything different now that it’s deteriorated this far 2) I’d have no idea who to believe, all 3 parties, the politician, the blogger and the author, had controversial reputations.
This really bugs me.
If you have dirt on all politicians, or on Nicky Hager, please divulge. Otherwise, you're engaged in smearing- saying nasty things about people without any evidence to back them up.
I sounds like you still haven't read the book. You should.
