What I’m reading: NZ edition

Rachel Stewart in the Taranaki Daily News and other provincial papers has a thoughtful column on gay marriage and civil unions and why they are not for her:

At the risk of appearing ungrateful and churlish, I’m with Mitt Romney on this one. I agree with him that marriage was intended as a union between a man and a woman. Just not for the same strange reasons as he does.

Read on.

Waikato Times columnist Josh Drummond, whom you met at lunch the other day, has published an open letter applying for the job of job of  Press Relations and Regulatory Affairs Manager at the New Zealand outpost of British American Tobacco, otherwise known as B.A.T.:

In support of my application, please observe my video resume, in which I take it upon myself to spread awareness of your suspiciously delicious, curiously addictive  (albeit cancer-causing) products, through the medium of dressing up as a large ambulatory cigarette, who I shall call B.A.T-Man. I trust this will meet with your total approval. As Freud didn’t say: “sometimes, a man dressed as a large ambulatory cigarette is just a man dressed as a large ambulatory cigarette.”

He’s not making it up – he really did dress up as an ambulatory cigarette and accost people in the streets of Hamilton, asking if they smoked and if not, why not. There is a video clip to prove it:

I haven’t heard yet whether he got the job. I hope so. It would pay better than some of the freelance “journalism” he is offered

Nicholas Reid reviews Vanda Symons’ new crime novel The Faceless. Money quote:

As an Aucklander, I applaud all the things she has got right. Some of us really are as revolting as the worst characters in this novel.

 A lovely piece by Mary McCallum on Helen Heath’s new poetry collection Graft.

James Zuccollo, an economist at NZIER, blogs on the Facebook IPO and how the media have reported the drop in share price as bad news for those who bought on Day One – though it’s good news if you want to buy shares today:

[. . . ] news needs to be normatively charged to be worthwhile. A drop in share prices is good for some people and bad for others, but it probably doesn’t involve a loss of social welfare. Yet, to be a good news story, it needs to have a normative dimension with a hero and a baddie.

Chad Taylor has a new episode of his comic out, City Lights II: Planet of Fear, a sequel to January’s City Lights. Words by Chad, pictures by Jonathan King. May contain aliens. It’s fun, and he says it’s fun to do:

It’s cheaper than making films and a break from writing prose: write the characters, action and dialogue, and ping that off / against the images. It would have cost a small fortune to print this in the old days and the night scenes would have gone to black. Now we can play with the whole digital paintbox, for next to nothing.

Philip Matthews praises Beautiful Machine, the “surprisingly excellent” new documentary about Shihad:

[. . .] the Shihad story is rare in that this is a New Zealand rock band whose story is not a failure – not yet, anyway. The band is still together and making a living and if they never conquered America and Europe, they weren’t destroyed by the effort either. 

Finally, LaughyKate has invented a new acronym, WKSGM. I fear that her colleagues and family will be hearing it a lot.