Wednesday 26 October 2016

Do as I say, not as I do

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Like many of you I have a smartphone that regularly posts alerts of news as it happens with succinctly-written pop-ups. This service is an unsolicited add-on if you have downloaded the apps of NZ Herald, One News and Stuff. The brief messages are invariably tidings of bad news with murders, car crashes and violent assaults dominant.

It’s part of our human nature that compels us to eagerly absorb these catastrophes.

We read recently where suicides are reaching almost epidemic proportions and I fear our constant diet of doom and gloom wouldn’t be helping this sad statistic.

It’s no good blaming the news media, they simply serve up what the public demands. I must confess when I go into a supermarket or other places where newspapers are sold I peruse the front page to decide whether to buy or not. A salacious headline is likely to positively influence my purchase.

I had first-hand experience of this some ago. I used to subscribe to a newspaper called Challenge Weekly. This was published by some evangelistic churches in Auckland and the content was most uplifting. I had a call from the editor one day who had noted I was the only subscriber in the Wairarapa and wondered would I perhaps like to become their agent down this way and see if I might increase their reader base. I agreed, but made no sales. It seemed no one wanted to hear the good news. Sadly, I too tired of the praiseworthy narratives and eventually let my subscription lapse.

Challenge Weekly is available on line and I note that to maintain interest it is now inclined to run the occasional adverse article.

But let’s examine last week’s bad news stories. Apart from the sombre suicide statistics one correspondent believes we are on the brink of World War Three. Another news item warns us that Germany’s Deutsche Bank is teetering after receiving a $US14 billion fine from the U.S. Department of Justice which could evolve into another global financial crisis. Poor old Pumpkin Patch, once one of this country’s most admired stores, has announced its own financial crisis and owes the ANZ Bank a small fortune.


Americans are reeling over the possibility that the worst possible president imaginable might be elected to lead the free world. There is little comfort in the fact that failing this, the second worst possible person to be president will be elected instead.

Closer to home Auckland holds this country to ransom with its various crises that include house prices which must inevitably collapse to the detriment of the whole country, and poverty stricken children and citizens living in cars and on the street. They then elect a man, whose own political party didn’t want a bar of, to lead them to the Promised Land.

North and South magazine recently called them “The city of fails.”

Re-reading this I realise I am hoist by my own petard. Having complained that the media is only interested in conveying bad news stories, I have done the very same thing myself.

Reminds me of the old saying; “If you can’t say something good about somebody - then let’s hear it!”

“Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news. Give to a gracious message a host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.” - William Shakespeare

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Wednesday 19 October 2016

Smile, you're on candid camera

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Many years ago I became acquainted with a part-Maori man named Robert who would often come into my office unannounced and tell me that God spoke to him. Initially I was sceptical, but I came to realise that the utterances, apparently from higher plain, were actually full of wisdom and were articulately expressed. So instead of looking for a reason to appear too busy to see him, I would resignedly accept his visits and listen to his dialogue.

I particularly remember on one occasion when he told me that on the previous evening God had told him that soon all crime would cease. The reason being, according to God, was the proliferation of video cameras; nothing it seems would ever be done again in secret. To some extent George Orwell had already forecast this, but 1984 had come and gone with little change in the crime rate. About this time the District Council had started installing CCTV cameras in the CBD so I thought there may be a grain of truth in this divine forecast.

I got to think about this last week when we were privy to the trial of an Australian named Gable Tostee who was accused of murdering a young New Zealand lady who had willingly strayed into his fourteenth floor apartment.

Thanks to CCTV footage the information available to the prosecution was mind-boggling. Warriena Wright’s and Tostee’s movements were readily discernible as they moved from place to place including a few minutes in a nightclub, buying beer at a bottle shop and then arriving back at the Gold Coast tower where Tostee, a carpet layer, was able to afford a luxury apartment. After Ms Wright’s disastrous fall Tostee was seen aimlessly wandering around the adjacent suburb and casually consuming a pizza on a park bench.


What God didn’t think to tell my friend Robert was that in the distant future a fellow named Steve Jobs would come up with an iPhone that not only had a video capability, but an audio device allowing the user to record conversations, secretly or otherwise.

Tostee recklessly switched on the recorder on his smartphone at some stage during the evening. Just why he would choose to do this when all manner of shenanigans were going on in his apartment has never been explained, but the outcome was that the whole evening was either filmed or recorded.

The ensuing banter and subsequent distress cries from Ms Wright, when played for world consumption in the courtroom, were particularly upsetting for her mother, Merzabeth Tagpuno.

The audio device did not just bring down Tostee. A man and his wife used it to record a ten-minute tryst between All Black half-back Aaron Smith and an unidentified young lady behind the door of a disabled toilet at Christchurch airport. Smith would have had a lot of explaining to do to his fiancée and the man who made the recording, and then blamed his wife for exposing it publically, says his marriage is also now under stress.

Meanwhile Steve Jobs is probably up there sitting at the left hand of God; they’ll both be shaking their heads and saying, perhaps in unison: “They reap what they sow.”

“If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery” – Michael Harrington

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Wednesday 12 October 2016

Well I'll be doggone!

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I’ve recently reached the conclusion that the keeping of domestic pets is an endeavour coming to an inevitable end. Last week we learnt that the Wellington City Council have offered to desex the city’s cats at virtually no cost to their owners. If the desexing programme is successful then within a few cat generations the species will have disappeared altogether.

Game, set and match to Gareth Morgan.

Cats aren’t the first in line. Circuses have lost their animals and Napier’s performing dolphins were returned back to the ocean some years ago.

The writing is clearly on the wall and so I sat the dog that totally rules our household down after I had seen the TV news item and told her that her days as a domesticated pet would appear to be numbered. Molly is a shitzu/poodle. She gets embarrassed when people shorten her lineage by linking the first four letters and the first three letters of the two breeds and I often wonder if I should be feeding her shitake mushrooms. That aside, I said I thought that seeing the dolphins had been released from their swimming pools goldfish would soon be banished from their endless bowls, and those folk with budgies, canaries and parrots would be the next to be ostracised, closely followed by guinea-pig keepers. Cats were now unable to multiply and so it would soon be the dog-owners turn to release their pets.


Although I couldn’t give her an exact timetable, I did suggest that I would start taking her around the backs alleys of the town and teach her how to forage for food.

She seemed a bit non-plussed. She walked me over to the ranch slider where her sheepskin rug is laid out allowing her maximum sunlight during the daylight hours when she is not sleeping on our bed and then back to the TV where she watches her favourite show, Animal Planet. Finally, with a typical canine gesticulation, she motioned towards the next door cat, who just happened to be lurking on the path above our house and was about due to have its daily exercise, by being chased back to its own confines.

It was perfectly clear that although the animal rights people felt she should be returned to her natural habitat, she was supremely happy with the life she had carved out for herself at my considerable expense. To emphasise the point she patiently watched me fill her food bowl with turkey flavoured morsels that look at least equal to what we are planning to have ourselves for Christmas dinner.

You might worry that thoroughbred horses are the next endangered species, but I think not. The racing industry pays huge taxes, and the TAB is one of the government’s smartest little earners. Although publicly abhorring games of chance it hypocritically promotes visits to these government gambling dens, so it’s my contention that sporting animals will be totally exempt. If most dogs are deemed to be doomed then Molly will have wished she was born a greyhound.

Dogs are supposed to be man’s best friend, but when did you ever have your best friend spayed or neutered?

“Why is a lobster any more ridiculous than a dog - or any other creature one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters: they are peaceful and solemn, they know the secrets of the sea, they do not bark, and they do not eat into the essential privacy of one’s soul the way dogs do.” - Gerard de Nerval

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Wednesday 5 October 2016

A fond memory

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Entertainment back the 1950s, sans television of course, came in many forms, not the least being, in the summer anyway, the weekly swimming sports at the Dixon Street baths. This public swimming pool was situated opposite Trust House Memorial Park. They were known as the “men’s baths” though both men and women were admitted. Demure and sensitive women could bathe at the gender exclusive “ladies baths” which were at the northern end of Dixon Street. Despite the fact that female bathing suits became more revealing, eventually these baths lost their allure and were transformed into what we now call the Hosking garden.

A full house ensued every Tuesday at the swimming sports, due in great part to the final item on the programme, the diving. Two young men in their early teens were the attraction. One was Rex Malmo, a superb diver with a perfect physique, and Tony Ball. Tony was the antithesis of the well-coordinated Rex Malmo. After Rex had executed the perfect running one and a half somersault (for instance) Tony would appear on the board in outrageous clothing which could be a woman’s dress or a man’s suit, and with amazing dexterity run along the board and repeat the dive in the worst possible manner and have the crowd in stitches.

Other antics might include riding a bike off the board with an umbrella held aloft, or he could pretend to absentmindedly walk off the diving board into the pool, fully clothed and reading a book. Whatever, between the two of them, both great friends I gather, with their diametrically opposed performances they ensured a full house every Tuesday night.

Although he looked awkward on the diving board, to get away with what he did Tony needed to have perfect timing and a degree of athleticism that was possibly unrecognisable. This was how he escaped injury, despite the contortions of his performance.

He then used this uncanny ability to race motorbikes. At seventeen he was fast becoming a future Aaron Slight.

When not performing on the diving board or on his motorbike he was an unassuming person. He was in my class at Wairarapa College and we all had great respect for him. We would eagerly read about his exploits in Monday’s daily paper as he successfully competed on the race tracks around New Zealand each weekend.


Then the unthinkable happened. At aged eighteen he crashed and was killed in at the annual Wanganui motor-cycle meeting on Boxing Day in 1957 on what was ominously known as the Cemetery Circuit.

The funeral service was held at St. Matthew’s church on a Saturday morning; standing room only as the town and the college mourned the death of this larger-than-life figure. There wasn’t a dry eye in the sanctuary; it certainly advanced the maturing process of his classmates.

Nearly sixty years on and many will have forgotten his legacy. Anthony Charles Ball was an inspiration, and he helped brighten and influence our young lives. He was one of those characters that our communities seem sadly devoid of in these bland times.

Television, the iPhone, the iPad and the internet have all got a lot to answer for.



"I remain just one thing, and one thing only – and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician." - Charlie Chaplin

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