As mentioned
here previously,
people often ask me, “How do you find living in Cambridge, population 18,400,
after living for so long in Auckland, population 1.5 million?”
Here is the full police report from this week’s issue of the
Cambridge Edition:
Wednesday November 18
There was a car vs power pole on Kaipaki Rd, there were no
injuries but the driver will go to court for careless driving.
A Cambridge man has admitted to tagging places in Cambridge
with the word “gherk”. Investigations are continuing.
A man from Tokoroa was caught shoplifting at The Warehouse.
A large B-train (truck and trailer unit) drove over the
Hydro Rd Karapiro bridge, damaging the barrier and two wheels on the vehicle.
The driver will receive a number of offence notices.
There was unlawful interference of a boat on Keats Tce.
Overnight there was a burglary at a farm workshop, police
are waiting for a list of items.
Friday November 20
A Cambridge woman was arrested for shoplifting.
Two 17-year-old boys from Te Awamutu advised police that
they were involved in a fraud. They will be interviewed this week.
Overnight there was a burglary on Shaw St. Police are
awaiting a list of missing items.
Saturday November 21
There was a family violence incident on Vogel St.
There was a burglary on Bruntwood Rd. Crates were stolen
from an asparagus farm.
Someone drove into a wrought iron fence on Taylor St,
damaging the brick work.
I bought a copy of the November issue of Metro, out of kindness I suppose. Also
to see what Anthony Byrt had to say about art, and what Courtney Sina Meredith
had to say about “Urbanesia”.
As a former magazine person, I looked at the masthead, which
only magazine persons do, and discovered that Metro has a new editor, Susannah Walker. Nobody told me. She must
have answered this
ad seeking a “creative, solution orientated brand champion” and fitted the
bill. Good for her.
Her bio says:
Walker survived a childhood in Inglewood, the Taranaki town
once known as NZ’s Murder Capital
Ahem. Credit where it’s due: Inglewood was dubbed New
Zealand’s murder capital by me, when I wrote the intro to Graeme Lay’s article “Murder
in Moaville” in Quote Unquote the
magazine in May 1995. In that article he referred to Inglewood as “the
psychopath centre of New Zealand”, but I suppose Ms Walker preferred the soft
option of “murder capital”.
So here is Emmylou Harris with her Hot Band singing Townes
van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty”:
From
the edition of Monday 16 November. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar
and logic are exactly (you have no idea how carefully, how many times, I check
this) as printed in the Waikato Times.
These strange times
It seem that everything is in a state of flux and change. In
the home and in the world from politics, local institutions to the oceans of
the world and outer space. Surely there must be somewhere in this world that is
not in conflict. So everywhere we have some disagreements.
History doesn’t look as violent now when you look and
compare today’s problems. The ocean disputes in Asia, e.g. South China Sea,
Russia and China, Russia - border disputes.
I’m beginning to think that humans are not such a peaceful
race but find so many ways and means of creating struggle and skirmishes. Then
you have the family partnerships and politics that keeps the world spinning.
Ken Weldon
Hamilton
So here are the Simple Image with their July 1968 #1 hit (in
New Zealand) “Spinning, Spinning, Spinning”. They were our Tremeloes.
My night as Rob
Muldoon, I mean. Tomorrow night is a family 50th birthday party. It is a
fancy-dress party. I hate fancy-dress. We have all been assigned characters: Hamish,
an athletic type, is to come as Bart Simpson; Jane, who is very attractive, is
to come as Hilda Ogden from Coronation
Street; Kate, who is slender, is to come as Dolly Parton (or as she puts it,
“Dolly fucking Parton!”).
My wife is to come as Helen Clark, which is OK as Helen is
an old friend of mine so I have been able to offer costume tips. However, I have
to come as former prime minister Rob Muldoon. Which is a problem.
How does one signify Muldoon? I could get drunk, I suppose:
But somehow I feel that more of an effort is called for. I could go around chatting up all the women, which would be
in character but perhaps get me into trouble – Cambridge husbands tend to be
large. I could say over and over, “I
love you, Mr Lange,” but this might be misconstrued as well. It is a
problem.
On the bright side, at the end of the evening I get to go
home with Helen Clark.
(Photo credit: The Dominion Post Collection, Alexander
Turnbull Library. Also see Mary McIntyre’s painting Mickey Mouse and Robert Muldoon, based on this photo, here.)
The Wintec Press Club lunch is held three times a year by
the Wintec School of Media Arts and is hosted by Steve Braunias. The
star-studded guest list always features big names in politics, media,
entertainment, sport, business, law and the arts. This time they included Sasha
McNeil, Matt Nippert, Hugh Sundae, David Farrier, veterans of the Waikato Times and what seemed like the
entire staff of the Spin-Offwebsite(where Braunias runs the books pages), former Speakers of the
House Sir Kerry Burke and Dame Margaret Wilson, current MPs David Bennett and
Tim McIndoe and the odd novelist, alongside past and present students of the
Wintec media course.
The speaker is always a person of interest: this time it
was Heather
du Plessis-Allan, co-host of TV3’s current-affairs show Story. (Her co-host is Duncan Garner who
spoke at the Wintec Press Club in
May last year.)
Steve Braunias spoke at some length about the “crisis in
news”, here and overseas, with reference to newsroom staff cuts and the
desperation of news websites for stories that exhibit clickability. He talked
about the previous speakers at these lunches, singling out November
2014’s speaker Pam Corkery as “a generally unconvincing argument for
sobriety”. He handed out the 2015 Wintec Press Club awards.
There were some minor awards for Writer of the Year,
Sentence of the Year and other trivia, but what everyone in the room really
wanted to know was: who would win the coveted Best Friend of the Year award for
“the person outside of Wintec who has provided the most outstanding support for
journalism students”?
Reader, it was me. For, the citation said, my “entertaining
and almost certainly libellous chronicles” of these lunches right here on this
blog.
Braunias began his introduction of du Plessis-Allan by
explaining, “We’re in a hurry today because as you all know Heather has a jail
sentence to catch.” He insisted that the Chatham House rule applied to her
talk: if she happened to call TVNZ a bunch of c***s, no one was to mention it on
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or a blog. So if she did, I’m not saying. (She
didn’t.)
He extolled her track record and reporting skills along the
lines of the advance publicity where he wrote: “Heather’s work on the Saudi
sheep scandal this year was one of the best scoops of 2015. Heather is a dogged
and determined reporter – and her decision to leave TVNZ for TV3’s news roster
has restored some credibility to the network after its idiotic decision to lose
John Campbell.”
She began by saying, “That was really generous of you,
because I know how mean you can be,” which got a laugh. But as Wittgenstein would of
said, of the rest I cannot speak so thereof I must remain silent.
One thing, though: she advised the students and by
implication other journalists to set up Facebook pages. She said she got “so
many stories that way. People don’t email any more, just find you on Facebook.”
Pro tip.
'Three more things: she was briefly rude about the Wellington
thinker and Twitter disputant Giovanni Tiso, which amused the three of us in
the room who had heard of him. In response to a Braunias witticism, she said,
“Ha ha. Fuck you, Steve.” And later to Barry Soper, her husband, after an
amusing exchange, “I’ll make it up to you later. I’ll buy you something.”
She was great: funny, full of good stories and, more
important, good advice. What was really striking about her talk, and her
replies to the questions afterwards, was the passion for serious journalism
that came through. It must have been inspiring for the students and recent
graduates present. It’s pretty dismal out there, what with all the job cuts at
the big media organisations, stories from Fairfax’s print editions appearing
(and staying) on the Stuff website only if they have a high click-through
rating, and other depressing industry developments. It must be hard for keen
young journalists to stay motivated.
On the other hand, nobody looks at Rachel Glucina’s
ridiculous clickability-driven “entertainment + celebrity news” website Scout,
so there is hope. Faint hope, but these days we’ll take what we can get.
So, in light of HDP-A’s possibly precarious position legally
gun-wise, here is Warren Zevon live in Boston in 2000 with “Lawyers, Guns and
Money”:
