Wintec Press Club: Sean Plunket edition

The Wintec Press Club luncheon is staged by the Wintec School of Media Arts three times a year for the benefit of their journalism students. The guest list features big names in politics, media, entertainment, sport, business, law and the arts. And me. The MC is Steve Braunias.

It’s a brilliant idea and I have always enjoyed talking with the students. I try to discourage them from entering the profession, suggesting they instead do something useful or lucrative. The industry veterans like it too because this is the last Press Club left standing. The speakers are usually eminent media types – last year’s speakers included musician Dave Dobbyn (whose band Th’Dudes controversially won the 1976 Battle of the Bands, ahead of me and Jenny Morris); controversial poet Hera Lindsay Bird; and controversial Herald columnist and professional angry person Rachel Stewart. This year we had Labour’s then deputy leader Jacinda Ardern. I was banned from the luncheon with the then deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett, but here we are with the third meet of the year, on Friday 17 November.

The speaker this time was Sean Plunket. Back-story: born 1964; son of legendary Wellington newspaper court reporter Pat Plunket; co-presenter of Morning Report 1997-2010; more recently Director of Communications for Gareth Morgan’s vanity project, the Opportunity Party.

Guests included Don Brash and his partner Margaret Mary-Benge (whom I like because she is from Tauranga); Hamilton West Nat MP Tim McIndoe (whom I like because he is very rude about Tauranga, having lived there); Waikato Times editor Jonathan MacKenzie; Louise Wallace, “the real one not the Housewife”, she declared at one point; television persons Jono Pryor, Te Radar and Heather du Plessis-Allan; and Duncan Greive, the entrepreneur behind the Spinoff website.

Brash was runner-up for best-dressed male; the winner on the day was Barry Soper. The best-dressed female winner was a tattooed woman called Erin.

The best part of these lunches I always think is the pre-event chat. I was seated with McIndoe and MacKenzie so heard a lot from Tim about what it is like dealing with Winston Peters and from Jonathan what the future holds for Fairfax. Eye-opening, both.

In his opening remarks Braunias kicked off with: “I understand that I swear too fucking much.” He quoted my old Metro boss Warwick Roger saying there was a question every journalist should ask at least once in their career: “Are you by any chance insane?” He put that question to Sean Plunket and I don’t think he got a straight answer.

In his opening remarks Plunket kicked off with: “Duncan, lovely to see you, you fucking c—t.” This was a reference to a slight disagreement he and Grieve had during the election over (I think) whether Morgan was available for interview. Then he asked that there be no live-tweeting during his talk “because it’s fucking rude” – correct – but also because the tweets would lack context. Correct again.

He talked about his controversial tweet about Harvey Weinstein and the pile-on that followed: “If fifty people who hate you already hate what you tweeted, that is a controversy?”

The staff in the Opportunities Party all had PhDs so, he said, it was “quite nice not being the smartest guy in the room”. As far as I can tell from the internet Plunket did not attend university but went straight from school to the Wellington Polytechnic School of Journalism, so he may be more impressed by PhDs as a metric of intelligence than the rest of us. This also tells us a bit too how he regarded his colleagues at Radio NZ.

Talking about the election he was censorious about Metiria Turei: “Checkpoint has never said what were the nine questions they put to her and she resigned rather than answer them.”

And then along came Jacinda Ardern: “All the oxygen went out of the room”, he said. “Suddenly it was Bill vs Jacinda, pale stale male vs new chicky babe.”

Next, Gareth Morgan tweeted about “lipstick on a pig”. The Green Party declared war on us, he said, “largely on social media”. As he tweeted back “Bullshit, you were never going to vote for us anyway.”

There was a long rehash of the Duncan Greive/Spinoff story, which was possibly of interest to the students because of the politics/social media nexus. Then came a whole lot of politics, tax policy, snore. There was much more about Twitter and Weinstein, in which he used the phrase “wilful self-revulsion” of those outraged by it. The Broadcasting Authority, of which he was briefly a member, “was inundated with complaints – which means they had twenty. Fifteen of them were from Green Party members.”

Best line: “After 32 years in journalism you could probably use my ego as tiles on a space shuttle.”

Then came question time, during which Margaret Mary-Benge suggested that Sean Plunket, not Gareth Morgan, should lead the Opportunity Party. Plunket shyly demurred.

There was always going to be a Harvey Weinstein question. Asked if he had ever sexually harassed anyone at work, he replied, “Shit no!”

Eventually Braunias said: “We have five more questions while this train wreck lasts.”

In his wrap-up – these invariably begin with “What have we learned?” – Braunias compared Plunket’s account of working for Gareth Morgan with Pam Corkery’s chaotic account at this same event in 2014 of working for Kim Dotcom: “You kind of blamed everyone else.” About Plunket’s ban on live-tweeting his speech, he said, “There wasn’t really anything worth tweeting.”

He concluded, “Maybe the problem is when journalists stop asking the questions and think they have the answers.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I couldn’t agree more.

Spectator sentence of the year

From Dot Wordsworth’s language column about Bishop Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”:

He was a clever man and agreeable, leaving an account of the once-a-century Mallard ritual enacted on the rooftops of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1800, but dying upon taking a bath as Bishop of Calcutta, aged 42.

Are you as curious about what the “Mallard ritual” might be as I am?

UPDATE:

Thanks to Stephanie in the comments we learn that the Mallard ritual involves the Mallard Song, which “was sung after a rude manner about 1658 about 2 or 3 in ye morning, which giving a great alarm to ye Oliverian soldiery then in Oxon they would have forced ye gate open to have appeased ye noise”. 

The lyrics may be found here at the Mallard Society’s website, which warns that the fifth verse “was expunged on grounds of decency in 1821”. If you are bold enough to explore, you will realise that “swapping” in the lyric meant something different in Middle English from what it means now. 

Waikato Times letter of the week #83

From the edition of Saturday 4 November. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Monster planet find
Today’s (November 2) page 4 headline “Kiwi leads team’s ‘monster planet’ find” once again dismisses scientific perspective as the best tool for ascertaining cosmic truth, in our search for understanding all of “existence” and our attempts to define “limits” to the universe. The article clearly establishes that the “find” of the giant planet in orbit around a small star which could not have “created” that planet, confounds the scientific perspective of how planets and solar systems are formed . . . ie, the perspective of our science highly distorts the search for actuality, when the generally accepted theory of planet and star formation is now shown to be wrong, or at least subject to exceptions, even within the tiny part of existence that perspective and science arrogantly describe as “the universe”.

Even such discoveries as this one in question, while a great credit to some of the scientific research going on in this field, also serves to show us that the philosophical and intrinsic-intuitive understanding of the reality of existence will eventually reveal far more truths of its nature than our ego-centralised scientific perspective ever will.
Dennis Pennefather
Te Awamutu  

Waikato Times letter of the week #82

From the edition of Wednesday 18 October. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Remove limitations

Is it to do with something that in this country incredible limitations are placed upon students in schools and universities?

The terms of doctrinal demands to fit within hard and set limits, universal. To solve these problems would be an education in itself. Society can encourage exploration and excellence to feel the freedom of peace where others can understand the way we see.

We see things now in a modern context way, dictatorships and social subjection are outmoded concepts. It is for society to decide how they are ended. Replaced with organisations created by those with the wit and philosophy to allow people the gift of enjoying life.

Peter J N Garland

Hamilton 

Economist letter of the week

From the 30 September edition:

Breezy rhetoric

You stated that Britain remains the world leader in offshore wind power (“Hull of a wind behind it”, September 16th). That would be contested by the Danes and the Germans who supply Britain with the turbines, the Italians who make the cables, the French who provide everything but the turbines, and the Dutch who install them. The subsidy, however, is 100% British.

A.J. MACKINNON

Ely, Cambridgeshire

Election 2017: Dancing Cossacks edition

For younger readers baffled by their elders’ occasional references to Dancing Cossacks, this was a three-minute “party political broadcast”, i.e. an ad, for the National Party in the 1975 election. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

Written by Michael Wall, then of the Colenso advertising agency, it was credited with National’s massive win. The ad was controversial at the time, essentially for accusing Labour, led by Bill Rowling, of being a bit, well, you know, socialist, but looking at it again the most shocking thing about it for me is the lack of an apostrophe in “April Fool’s Day” in the first few seconds of the animation. 

The dancing Cossacks themselves were on screen for just five seconds, so 2.78% of screentime –  from the 1 min 15s mark it is just National leader Robert Muldoon behind his desk talking directly to the viewer about his policy on superannuation and why it was better than Labour’s. Leaving aside the politics, the ad treats the viewer a lot more seriously than today’s election ads: nearly two minutes of the party leader talking policy, not feels. (Thanks to Simon Carr aka @simonsketch for the link.)

It would be interesting to see some Labour ads from that year – from memory they were made by Wall’s friend and fellow Westie Bob Harvey, then of the McHarmans advertising agency.  

Book review of the month

Adam Rutherford, a geneticist who tweets at @AdamRutherford, has posted on Amazon a brief review of AN Wilson’s new Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker. He gives the book one out of a possible five stars, and heads his review “Deranged: literally the worst book I have ever read about Darwin and evolution”. 

I am a scientist who has studied evolution and genetics for many years. I have also extensively written about Charles Darwin. Singularly, I have never come across a more incoherent, inconsistent, deranged attempt to analyse Darwin as a man and his science. If AN Wilson has indeed researched this book for 5 years, as he has claimed, he has managed to do something impressive, which is to draw conclusions which are so comprehensively bonkers as to fall into the category of ‘not even wrong’. This book is littered with errors, both trivial and fundamental, ones that could easily be fact-checked. But Wilson seems not to care. His understanding of evolution, of genetics, and of science in general is comically egregious – based on this book, he would fail GCSE biology catastrophically. The anti-Darwinian arguments presented here are not even as cogent as those presented by Young Earth Creationists.

* To associate Darwin with Hitler’s policies is at best misguided and at worst intellectually dishonest: Darwin’s scientific ideas have little to do with the political ideas of Social Darwinism, and the deranged policies of Nazism drew from distortions of the works relating to Norse mythology, the Bible and a host of other sources.

*To suggest Darwin did not credit others who thought on evolution before him is not borne out by the fact that he lists more than 38 who did just that, in the Origin of Species itself.

*To assert that there are no transitional fossils is not supported by the fact that there are literally millions of transitional fossils.

*To suggest that genetics does not support Darwinian natural selection is contrary to the view held by every biologist in the world that genetics fully reinforces natural selection.

The only valid criticism I can find herein of Darwin is that he might have been flatulent, which can be attributed to a serious disease that he picked up on his travels on the Beagle.

And so on. I can’t for the life of me work out how a serious writer could draw these conclusions about someone who has been studied for more than a century, on a subject that millions of people have spent millions of hours and millions of £££ testing. I can only conclude that AN Wilson is not a serious man.

The pagination is excellent. I like the picture of the bat on the back cover.

Fun fact: the original version of the review had “batshit” instead of “bonkers”, and Amazon refused to publish it. This is the genetically modified version.

So here is David Bowie live in 1995 with “I’m Deranged” from that year’s album 1. Outside. Gail Ann Dorsey on bass, obv.

The uses of humour #1

Alex von Tunzelmann tweets: 

In Britain, humour is used to cut off conversations before they can get emotional, boring or technical.

So here are Procol Harum in 1967 with “Quite Rightly So”:

Today is my birthday

So here are the Killers at the Isle of Wight festival in 2013 performing “When I’m 64”. 

Yes, that is how old I am. Even though I did maths to Stage III so obviously can count, I really did not see this coming.

Money for writers #3

The University of Waikato invites applications for Writer in Residence for 2018. The salary is $52,000. Yes, $52,000.

The position is open to writers of serious non-fiction, dramatists, novelists, short story writers and even poets. It helps to have a record of previous publications of high quality, and (I am paraphrasing based on my experience of assessing similar applications) making a good case for why this particular residency would help with your project.

As well as the $52K the fellow gets an office with computer in the School of Arts and access to the university library. There are no teaching or lecturing duties, and the fellow will be able to make use of the Michael King Writers’ Retreat in Opoutere for up to two weeks. A fortnight in Coromandel all paid for!

On the other hand, “The Writer is expected to live in Hamilton during the tenure of the award.” So, swings and roundabouts.

Full information is here: applications close on Friday 29 September.

Country matters #6

Michael Baume in the Spectator on cow dialects:

Keeping inequality in proper perspective, the London Evening Standard last week ran a full page article quoting Sir Patrick Stewart’s US National Public Radio talk explaining that the dialects of British cows’ moos reflect, like their human counterparts, ‘a society dominated by class, social status and location’. He noted that ‘the sound made by a cow from West Oxfordshire, birthplace and home to many right of centre politicians, is quite an upper-class bray compared with those from West Yorkshire’. The National Farmers Union backed this up, maintaining that when cows are mo(o)ved from one area of strong accents to another, there is a problem of them initially not responding to the new accent. ‘Cows in the West Country have the distinctive Somerset twang (more of a ‘moo-arr’) while Midlands beasts moo with Brummie accents and Geordie tones are heard Tyneside. And in the US, those bred in the southern states sound very different from the moos heard in the north’. In the Anglosphere’s animal farms, all cows are not equal.

I wonder if this is the case in New Zealand, that a Friesian from Southland might have a different moo from a Waikato Friesian’s, perhaps with a hint of a burr. 

National’s Bill English is a farmer from Dipton in Southland and Labour’s Jacinda Ardern is from Morrinsville in the Waikato, so perhaps this could be a question in the Leaders’ Debate come the election. Can they tell the difference between regional moos? 

Waikato Times letter of the week #81

From the edition of Thursday 17 August. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Seabed mining

I see from your Friday paper that seabed mining is back in the news and I expect that seabed residents will be driven out.

However they do not have mortgages or children at school so I guess they will just move onto new pastures as they did in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, east of England, when seabed mining disturbed them.

Ian McKissack

Hamilton

In praise of: Taylor Swift

Well, more a poem for David Mueller, the creep recently convicted of sexual assault on singer Taylor Swift. It is by Denis Glover and it goes like this:

I’m an Odd Fish

I’m an Odd Fish

A No-Hoper:

Among Men a Snapper,

Among Women

A Groper.

This poem from his collection Dancing to My Tune (Catspaw Press, 1974: my copy is signed by Lauris Edmond for some reason) is perhaps not as funny now as it seemed at the time.

So here is Taylor Swift with “Shake It Off”:

Waikato Times letter of the week #80

From the edition of Friday 11 August. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Predator-free stupidity

The stupidest idea of this century must be to make New Zealand predator free by 2050. Because most New Zealanders are still science illiterate when they exit our education system, no one has thought to question what this actually means. Consider the following:

1. Possums, rabbits, rats and mice are largely vegetarian so cannot really be classed as predators. We will keep them.

2. Cats and dogs are predators. They will have to go.

3. Fantails are predators of midges; kiwi are predators of worms and weta; tuatara are predators of beetles and snails; native owls are predators of rats and mice; and so on. They will all have to go.

4. Humans are predators of rabbits, pigs, deer, pheasants, many types of fish and farm animals. They will have to go.

If New Zealanders want to live in a predator-free country this could be achieved by getting Kim Jong Un to aim his nuclear missiles here. Do we really want to get rid of all fast-breeding animals, which will be needed as survival foods when the next ice age comes?

Rainga Wade

Kihikihi 

What I’m reading #146

In the July Literary Review Lucy Lethbridge reviews seven books about Jane Austen. One, already savaged by Private Eye for its allegedly cavalier treatment of another author’s research, is Lucy Worsley’s BBC TV tie-in Jane Austen at Home:

The very first illustration [. . .] is a photograph of a broken egg cup recently unearthed in the garden of her childhood home, Steventon Rectory. ‘It’s not impossible’, reads the caption, ‘that Jane Austen once used it to eat a boiled egg.’ Well no, not impossible, but…

After further consideration, Lethbridge concludes:

There’s much intriguing historical detail but also quite a lot of padding (‘imagine Jane happy, if you will, life before her, running through the Hampshire fields on a summer evening’), occasionally intercut with questions guaranteed to wake up the snoozing telly viewer. ‘Did Jane ever have lesbian sex?’ is one. The answer, unsurprisingly, is probably not.

Speaking of Private Eye, in the 14 July issue (not online) Remote Controller reviewed ITV’s Love Island, a reality show “in which all the narrative tension comes from who will shag whom, and whether it will be before the first or second commercial break”:

What has shocked ITV is that a franchise aimed at a target audience whose average evening involves four neck-tattoos and necking eight Jägerbombs has scored highly with viewers keener on fair-trade nail varnish and organic Sav Blanc. Eng Lit graduates will find that Love Island most resembles a porn movie based on the novels of Iris Murdoch, with names uncommon at the font bewilderingly swapped: “Theo said to Tyla that Montana said to Theo…”

Meanwhile, in America, Kat Rosenfeld exposes The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter for Vulture. It is an extraordinary, long, thoroughly investigated account of online book reviews used as bullying – passed on by people who condemn the book in question without reading it – and the chilling effect this has on authors. I had not heard of YA Twitter, which:

regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic (an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other marginalizations). Led by a group of influential authors who pull no punches when it comes to calling out their colleagues’ work, and amplified by tens of thousands of teen and young-adult followers for whom online activism is second nature, the campaigns to keep offensive books off shelves are a regular feature in a community that’s as passionate about social justice as it is about reading.

According to Rosenfeld, such campaigns involving thousands of people tweeting and retweeting and Tumblring and the rest:

are almost always waged in the name of protecting vulnerable teens from dangerous ideas. These books, it’s claimed, are hurting children.But a growing number of critics say the draggings, well-intended though they may be, are evidence of a growing dysfunction in the world of YA publishing. One author and former diversity advocate described why she no longer takes part: “I have never seen social interaction this fucked up,” she wrote in an email. “And I’ve been in prison.”

What I’m reading #145

Not a lot because I am currently editing two manuscripts at once. This is not impossible, because only one is fiction, but it is suboptimal. Also, there is a funding round in progress for one of the organisations I help assess these things for, and it is quite a task working out how much fiction is involved in some of the applications.

The Spectator announces the results of competition 3008 in which entrants “were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written in the style of the author in question”. Great idea. The clever-clogs winner started: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” and you would think that Finnegans Wake would be impossible to parody but no.

All the others are good but my favourite was this, using The Da Vinci Code as the starting point:

For a moment, he thought he heard a woman’s voice — the wisdom of the ages — whispering up from the chasms of the earth to the splendour of St Peter’s. Langdon froze. ‘The wisdom of the ages’ — surely a coded message! Suddenly, in a sudden flash of realisation, he realised it. A totally contrived anagram! ‘An anagram!’ he realised. The Wisdom of the Ages = ‘Who misfeeds the goat?!’ Of course! Now he simply needed to find the unfortunate ungulate, and guilty goatherd… before it was too late! Heidi? Esmeralda? The Lonely… Suddenly, he had it — Paddy McGinty — whose goat swallowed dynamite! A deadly coded warning in deadly earnest! And Valentine Doonican = Neel doon in Vatican! In no time he found, behind the hassocks and dyslexic Scottish translations of tourist leaflets, the sticks of dynamite. The Vatican saved… but why had the clues been so obvious?

Slightly more topically for New Zealand readers, the Economist defends an often-criticised group:

One by one, prejudices are tumbling in the West. People may harbour private suspicions that other people’s race, sex or sexuality makes them inferior—but to say so openly is utterly taboo. As most kinds of prejudiced talk become the preserve of anonymous social-media ranters, though, one old strain remains respectable. Just ask a childless person.

And Private Eye reviews (not online – they’re not silly) John McEnroe’s second autobiography But Seriously:

This is an extended shrug of a book, a pointless, wildly self-indulgent ramble that reads like the transcript to an interview with a celebrity magazine during which the interviewer wandered off for a sandwich and couldn’t face going back.

Richard Thompson rips it up

The July issue of Uncut magazine has an interview with serious rock person Jason Isbell in which Nick Abbott of Leeds ask him, “Have you ever had any unusual pets?” Isbell replies:

Well, my wife had a cat named Richard Thompson. She was opening for Richard on this tour. They were playing in a little opera house and a cat came in and she decided tio keep him. So she named him Richard Thompson. She tried to keep him in the van, but he threw a fit and pissed all over the van and ripped all the seats open. She called me that night and neglected to explain the situation. She just told me Richard Thompson had pissed all over her van and ripped all the seats to pieces and said, “Oh God. He’s at it again.”

I love “neglected to explain the situation”. No English, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand speaker of English would say that.

So here is Richard Thompson performing the Britney Spears hit “Oops I Did It Again”:

In praise of: Peter Bland #2

A guest post by Mark Broatch.

Nice to get a poetry collection commissioned and published in the UK. But a follow-up? Doesn’t happen.

Peter Bland parted ways with Carcanet, publisher of his Selected Poems in 1998, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “vivid and witty. His impulse has been to continually celebrate the displaced and unremarkable.”

Then, says Bland, “somebody said John Lucas at Shoestring Press likes your work. He said, ‘Why not put together a collection of poems about your childhood in England during the war?’ So it was his suggestion and it got some nice critical responses.” Even better, it sold out. “Then he said, ‘Would you like to do another collection with me?’”

Shoestring Press put out Peter Bland’s Remembering England in 2014, presumably to coincide (ish) with the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. It mined Bland’s smog-filled memories of the 1930s, 40s and 50s as well as the odd one from the 1970s and beyond.

In London Grip, an independent online “cultural omnibus” with a special interest in poetry, John Forth said of it that the poems “are marked by an artfully fluent directness which tries to go unnoticed but creates a lasting effect, their meaning being very much the meat thrown by a burglar for the dogs”. Bland writes about a “lost generation”, he says, “their main gifts being ironic detachment, never taking themselves too seriously and the sense of humour that made us”.

The fluency of Bland’s work, says Forth, “is facilitated by his finding forms that do not draw attention to themselves. In being ostensibly secondary to what is being said in the poems, they become unobtrusively part of what is being said. If you’re still unsure who his ‘lost generation’ are – You can tell us a mile off even now;/ there’s a touch of austerity/ under the eyes…//… a lasting doubt/about the next good time. The effect here somehow leans on the word ‘lasting’, never mind the ‘doubt’ which might seem to be packing the punch. Now that’s what I call style.”

Josh Hinton in PN Review writes that the poems in Remembering England have “a gentle but powerful assurance”:

They do what the book’s title suggests, focusing on the England the poet knew, or rather, the two Englands: that of his childhood and youth in wartime, and that of his middle age in the 1970s, after his return from sixteen years in New Zealand. […] We see the boy in the bomb shelter: ‘Draw more ships,’ Grandma ordered, / keeping us busy between exploding bombs./ So we did, on wood-flecked wartime paper…/ The best were hung in old photo frames’. The violent backdrop is almost (but not wholly) inconsequential before the affectionate memory of children competing to see who could draw the best and win Grandma’s favour.

Shoestring specialises in publishing poetry collections “by established but unfashionable poets” or those who might be well known elsewhere but new to British readers.

“Not particularly fashionable” is the style of the new collection, Working the Scrapbook, says Bland, again heavily relying on the personal. It again uses what he calls “the first person plural” — it’s just another persona, he reckons, like the partly fictional voice of a memoir. But for him, it’s “where the real feeling comes from”.

The title? Bland has long kept scrapbooks, pasting in letters, photos, articles and reviews, family “stuff”, poems sent to him, art images and other gatherings. Often a poem will arise from looking at an old photograph, he says. The second part of Working the Scrapbook includes the poems of Loss, the 2010 collection he wrote after the death of his wife Beryl, and a couple of new ones.

For the six decades he has been writing poetry, Bland has had a foot in both New Zealand and the UK. In 1977 he won the Cholmondeley Award, a UK Society of Authors prize that has also been given to Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Philip Larkin, Fleur Adcock, Kingsley Amis, Allen Curnow and Alice Oswald. In 2011, having settled permanently back in New Zealand, he was awarded the poetry category of the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement.

Health problems prevent him from going to the launch of Working the Scrapbook on 30 June in London, but he says fellow poets Kevin Ireland, Fleur Adcock and CK Stead will do the honours and read some poems from the book.

Stephen Stratford adds:

Coincidentally, the latest issue of local poetry journal Broadsheet, edited by Mark Pirie, highlights Peter Bland’s work. The issue includes tributes by friends and colleagues, including Fleur Adcock, Glenn Colquhoun, Marilyn Duckworth, Riemke Ensing, Michael Harlow, Kevin Ireland, Louis Johnson, Kapka Kassabova, Bob Orr, Vincent O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Smither and CK Stead.

In Peter’s brief introduction he says:

The Argentinian poet Borges admits that there’s a need among poets ‘to be familiar with the renowned uncertainties of metaphysics,’ but only in order to make the best use of staying open to experience, and ‘to help pass on what we don’t know as much as what we do.’ The sources of poetry are as ancient as cave paintings and the modern poet still has to have something of the shaman left in him in order to be able to indulge in a little cave talk and to commune alone with the deeper sources of his imagination.

Here is Peter’s bio at the Academy of New Zealand Literature. His most recent publication in New Zealand is A Fugitive Presence (Steele Roberts, 2016); Elizabeth Coleman reviews it for Takahe here.

So here is Peter (reading from his 2014 collection Hunting Elephants) with Kevin Ireland and Fleur Adcock at the Devonport Library in December 2015:

Money for writers – heaps of it #2

Copyright Licensing NZ invites writers of fiction and non-fiction in all genres to apply for the CLNZ/NZSA research grants. There are four available: priority will be given to “projects of national or significant local interest and/or those that add significantly to the field or genre on a subject”.

Three of the grants are for $5000; the fourth includes the $5000 plus a six-week residential fellowship at Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre.

Aaron Fox received last year’s Stout Research Centre grant to work on a biography of Brigadier James Hargest. Fox, who like Hargest hails from Gore, says of his time at the Centre:

The access to the archives was truly invaluable as it got me to the centre of the research. If you’re looking for New Zealand history, you have to go to Wellington. Delving into the archives, you never know what you’re going to find.  I found myself in the middle of intellectual debate and working with other people in similar fields can get you involved in really stimulating conversations.

Applications for all four grants close at 4pm on Friday 21 July. Full details and guidelines are at the CLNZ website here; you can even submit your application online.

Waikato Times letter of the week #79

From the edition of Friday 16 June. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

‘Choice-less future’

I see that some schools are banning all drinks at school other than milk and water. To some people that may seem sensible, the way to go even, but it is only a short step from that to inspecting lunchboxes and dictating exactly what a school lunch shall consist of. 

Social commentators are preparing us for the choice-less future which will make individualism a sin. It will be a robotic future where no one will excel and no one will under-achieve. Sport or competition of any type will be pointless, because no one will be keeping score, in case it will offend a “tomorrow” of no winners – no losers. Perhaps in such a highly regimented and regulated “tomorrow” we can stack populations of billions into accommodation built for millions, while androids do all the work for us and even improve our systems to the extent that all innovation will be their domain, not ours. Perhaps mankind will then find his true place in the universe, alongside all of the other bacterium and viruses. 

Will a past membership of Mensa or a Nobel Prize in a family tree become a great cause for shame? Perhaps there is a cosmic truth finally dawning. Perhaps it is not about us after all. 

Dennis Pennefather

Te Awamutu

In praise of: Paddy Richardson

Stephanie Jones reviews the new Paddy Richardson novel Through the Lonesome Dark very positively (which is a relief for me, the book’s editor, as Stephanie is one of the few regular reviewers I take seriously):

From a porcelain-smooth introductory passage about the West Coast town of Blackball that could serve as a model of exposition to students of creative writing – this, class, is how you set a stage – to scenes of trench life in World War I, Dunedin writer Paddy Richardson masterfully entwines the intimate and the global [...]

I doubt there is any genre or era to which Richardson could not apply her virtuosity: her knack for inhabiting the minds of others, especially women in duress, is uncanny and hypnotic.

Through the Lonesome Dark has been on the NZ bestseller list since its launch, and my reckons are that when it starts to circulate around the book clubs it will find a whole new readership that will carry on and on and on.

So here are Crosby Stills Nash and Young in 1974 with “Carry On”:

Sir Geoffrey Palmer: the garden gnome edition

Rohan Long on Twitter posts this photo, saying “These just appeared in my local Bunnings and no one has any idea how they were made or how they got there.”

Bunnings, like Rohan Long, is Australian, which makes it baffling that they would trial these garden gnomes modelled on Sir Geoffrey Palmer (who was briefly 33rd Prime Minister of New Zealand, from 8 August 1989 to 4 September 1990) there.

They cost $59 in Australia. Why can’t we buy these here? And what would the local price be?

UPDATE
A friend in Hamilton reports that Bunnings Te Rapa has these in stock. We have a suitable place in our garden, so I shall go tomorrow to check it out.

Report on experience: dead goat edition

In my main office – Red Cherry café  – this morning I had a conversation with a very nice man who had this week buried two goats. His mother-in-law’s goats, which had died for no obvious reason, so he had to deal with them by digging deep holes somewhere on the farm, bunging them in and covering them with soil. One of them had rigor mortis, which made things awkward, burial-wise.

I arrived just after he had received a phone call to say that another of his mother-in-law’s goats had died, so he was setting off to bury it. “She has three more,” he said gloomily.

He must be getting good at this: he had buried a (dead) alpaca previously. If you know alpacas, they are intermediate in size between a goat and a horse.

I said brightly, “This manuscript I am working on is about the Otago Mounted Rifles – my grandfather’s regiment – heading off to Gallipoli and three horses die on the boat so they have to be disposed of. Carried up on deck by three men and hiffed over the side. They burst on impact, apparently.”

He knew all about dealing with dead horses on land. You get a truck with a winch, or something.

I never had conversations like this in all my years in Auckland.

So here are Monty Python with: “Four hours to bury a cat?”

In praise of: Paddy Richardson

Paddy Richardson’s new novel storms straight into #3 place in its first week in the Nielsen bestseller list. Through the Lonesome Dark (Upstart Press, $24.99) is not crime fiction this time but literary-historical, about family and friendship, love and loyalty, the coal mining life in Blackball  – and the hell that was the Western Front. It is brilliant. It made her agent cry – and you know how tough those cookies are.

I particularly recommend page 295 in which – spoiler alert – she says nice things about me.

Report on experience: Te Awamutu edition

In my early days at Metro magazine, late 80s, we had a feature, “Why I live where I live”. People were interviewed about why on earth they lived in, for example, Waterview or Kingsland.

I went to Te Awamutu this morning to meet a young client from Pirongia who has written a terrific YA fantasy novel. Good meeting, good café.

The 20-minute drive home to Cambridge was through lovely country – really lovely country, with Mt Pirongia to the west and Maungatautari looming to the east. Both are volcanoes, which is only slightly unsettling. Playing on Concert FM was Ursula Langmayr singing “Zerfliesse, mein Herze, in Fluten” from Bach’s St John Passion followed by Lilburn’s Second Symphony by the NZSO under James Judd. Both were New Zealand performances/recordings.

The sky was blue, the grass was green, the leaves on the trees were red and I thought, really, this is all right. I am happy to be here in New Zealand. 

So here is Wynton Marsalis in 2011 at Ronnie Scott’s performing “Autumn Leaves”.

Money for writers – heaps of it

Fancy $25,000? That’s how much the 2017 Copyright Licensing Writer’s Award is worth. Applications close at 4 p.m. next Friday, 9 June, so get in.

Non-fiction writers in particular are encouraged to apply. Any topic or genre is eligible, but applicants must be New Zealand citizens or permanent residents, and also be writers of proven merit.

Full application details are available on CLNZ’s website: the guidelines are here and the terms and conditions are here. You can even apply online.

Last year’s winner was Neville Peat for his project “The Invading Sea”. There were 74 applications: the judges said that those that stood out “paid close attention to the awards criteria, had engaging writing samples, and who were from applicants actively engaged with a prospective publisher”.

If you are going to apply, and you’d be mad not to, do pay attention to the criteria; do include a really good sample of your writing; and it really does help to have a publisher lined up. That last bit isn’t essential, it just helps, but the first two are absolutely crucial.

Waikato Times letter of the week #78

From the edition of Saturday 27 May. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Losing value

Oh, woe are we, country going to the dogs or perhaps Chinese. 

First they wanted to change the flag to a black sheet with a fish skeleton on it, now they want to drop the penguin from our fiver. 

I suppose a black and white panda called Nat-Nat or Lab-Lab (depending on who gets in at the next election) would be better than nothing. 

Without a penguin I expect the face value will be $4.50 and when they delete “New Zealand” it will slip down to $3.99. 

I have a 5/- note from Gibraltar and have longed for a $3.99 note. I might be in luck. 

Laurie Polglase

 Hamilton 

Wintec Press Club: Jacinda Ardern edition

The Wintec Press Club lunch is staged by the Wintec School of Media Arts three times a year for the benefit of the journalism students. The guest list features big names in politics, media, entertainment, sport, business, law and the arts. And me. The MC is Steve Braunias.

Most tables have one or two students who get to meet industry veterans. It’s a brilliant idea and I have always enjoyed talking with the students. I try to discourage them from entering the profession, suggesting they instead do something useful or lucrative. The speakers are usually eminent media types – last year’s speakers included musician Dave Dobbyn (whose band Th’Dudes controversially won the 1976 Battle of the Bands, ahead of me and Jenny Morris); controversial poet Hera Lindsay Bird; and controversial Herald columnist and professional angry person Rachel Stewart.

This luncheon’s speaker, Labour’s deputy leader Jacinda Ardern, was wilfully not controversial.

Media star guests this time included the Herald’s Matt Nippert; TV One’s Te Radar; former Metro columnist Charlotte Grimshaw; current Waikato Times columnist Peter Dornauf (as featured in Waikato Times letters of the week #76 and Waikato Times letter of the week #77) introduced by Braunias as “the cat in the hat”;  Louise Wallace from “reality” TV show The Real Housewives of Auckland; and Herald columnist Lizzy Marvelly, her eyes shining with the light of certainty. Thrillingly, there was also Lawrence Arabia, whose music I like very much. If I had known he would be there I would have brought a CD and asked him to autograph it: one is never too old to be a gushing fan.

Political star guests included James Shaw, Julie Anne Genter and Chloe Swarbrick of the Greens; Willie Jackson formerly of Mana Motuhake, the Alliance, the Maori Party and currently of Labour; Don Brash, formerly of National and Act (he introduced himself; I bonded instantly with his partner who is from Te Puna, near my turangawaewae of Pukehinahina); and various people world-famous in Hamilton local politics. 

Charles Riddell of the Wintec media course told me that this is the only press club in the country left standing. Can this be true? It would explain why so many journalists from around the country attend. It was a bit like the Canon Media Awards, only a lot less drunk.

Lunch was chicken roulade with sesame and hazelnut spiced dukkah, served on sweet carrot puree with a potato and herb rosti with seasonal green vegetables. Dessert was dark chocolate torte with Black Doris plum puree and an almond praline crisp meringue. It was quite nice. Also, wine.

Our host Steve Braunias, a journalism student in 1980, began proceedings with a very long introduction. It was about three times as long as usual. Yes, that long. Sample quotes: “this is the first day of regime change”, “election year”, “the fucking National government”, “Queenstown, Hamilton of the South”.

I was told when I entered the venue that I was not to report what the speaker said. No reason given. On the other hand, I am a Life Member of the Wintec Press Club and have the certificate to prove it. So here goes.

Actually, there wasn’t much to report. Jacinda read her speech from notes: there was nothing about party politics, for which one was grateful; she talked mostly about social media and clickbait on news websites. Which was relevant for the audience, but was a bit dull and unquotable. However, she came alive at question time.

Annemarie Quill (reliably hilarious) from the Bay of Plenty Times – that Tauranga connection again – asked, “Does Andrew Little dull your shine? Do you ever want to push him off a cliff?”

Tony Wall of the Sunday Star-Times asked, “Do you sometimes feel like a winner in a loser party?”

It was all a bit like that. The room liked Jacinda – well, everyone does. (I do – when we met at the May 2012 lunch, she said she was reading my latest book. And she was.) She handled all these friendly but often awkward questions with grace and good humour.

Tim Murphy of Newsroom was live tweeting. Some samples:

Jacinda Ardern to a question on Peters: 'Is he a racist?' Long pause. 'I think Winston knows what he's doing.'

— Tim Murphy (@tmurphyNZ) April 28, 2017

Ardern on Peters: "If the electorate delivers a result meaning would we negotiate with him? 'Yes'"
Audience member: 'Could you not?'

— Tim Murphy (@tmurphyNZ) April 28, 2017

Ardern: on being a professional politician - and her view on outsiders like Trump: 'What – so you elect a professional arsehole, instead?'

— Tim Murphy (@tmurphyNZ) April 28, 2017

Ardern's grilling continues, from young journo: 'You have a man above you that you've refused to roll? What does that say about you?'

— Tim Murphy (@tmurphyNZ) April 28, 2017

MC Braunias: 'We have time for a couple more questions'
Ardern: 'Do we have to?'

— Tim Murphy (@tmurphyNZ) April 28, 2017

Daily Telegraph letter of the month

Reprinted in The Week, 13 May:

Up in smoke

Britain’s coal-free days are celebrated – but ironically are down to Drax, Europe’s largest coal-fired power station which, by burning wood, now produces 16% of Britain’s renewable energy. This wood is grown in the US and brought in on ships that produce more pollution than all the diesel cars in London combined.

Kevin Prescott, Littlehampton

West Sussex

It’s not easy being green. So here is Kermit the Frog, with a visitor from Walton-on-Thames:

In memoriam Rosie Scott

Very sad news from Australia – New Zealand-born novelist and literary activist Rosie Scott has died. She was a fine writer, great fun to be with and a force for good in her lucky adopted country. Condolences to Danny, Josie and Bella.

Here is the Australian Society of Authors obituary:

17.05.17

We were saddened to learn that Rosie Scott passed away on 4th May as she has been so important to the organisation, having served on our board and executive for ten years, during which time she was elected Chair. In 2005, she was appointed to a permanent honorary position on the ASA Council.

Author and activist, Rosie was a greatly respected and admired member of the ASA community. While she was Chair she helped instigate and then continued to champion our mentoring program, working as a professional mentor for over a decade. In her position on the Council, she was also part of the committee that selected the first 200 books for Copyright Agency's Reading Australia venture.

Her first published work was a 1984 volume of poetry Flesh and Blood, followed by the play Say Thank You to the Lady, for which she won the prestigious Bruce Mason Award in 1986 in New Zealand. In 1988 she published her first novel, Glory Days, which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards and published internationally in Australia, Germany, UK and the US. Rosie went on to publish five more novels, a short story collection and a collection of essays.

In 2013 Rosie co-edited an anthology on asylum seekers with Tom Keneally, A Country Too Far. She later started the group We’re Better than This, a movement dedicated to fighting against the detention of refugee children.

On Australia Day in 2016, she was awarded Member (AM) in the General Division of The Order of Australia Honour, not only for her service to literature, but also for her work in human rights and inter-cultural understanding. Later that year she was also the recipient of the NSW Premier’s Special Award for her “significant service to literature as an author”.

As if this weren't achievement enough, Rosie also completed a Diploma in Counselling and a Doctorate at the University of Western Sydney, taught creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney and continued to mentor and inspire young and novice writers.

Current ASA CEO Juliet Rogers said, “Rosie will long be remembered and honoured within the ASA family, not only for her celebrated career as a writer of standing in both New Zealand and Australia, but also for her passionate activism, caring advocacy and thoughtful mentorship to so many. Rosie left her mark on this organisation and our thriving mentorship program is just one manifestation of this. We were very fortunate to have had more than a decade of her leadership, care and support and we will miss her. We send much love to her family at this difficult time."

Close friend and ASA colleague Robert Pullan remembers Rosie:

“When she limped out of her last ASA board meeting everyone clapped, not because Rosie was leaving — hobbling after a hip reconstruction — but because she was as always the real thing, going because she had to, going because she had reached the end of a small sentence — the ASA one — in the immense Rosie narrative.

“On the wide wooden verandah in the country retreat we shared for a few magical years in Buladelah, overlooking grassed hills that stretched into morning cloud, Rosie radiated a calm that eluded some of us in the collective, including me. She was our still centre, smiling in greeting as the city latecomers emerged in the evening from the three-hour drive from Sydney.

“‘I go through with all my characters in a pretty visceral and intuitive way,’ she wrote in Movie Dreams, saying her struggle to acquire a male character’s voice was ‘easily the most painful and difficult process I have ever gone through writing a novel’.

“None of us knows ourselves entirely. How could we, with the multitudes we contain? But conversation with Rosie always contained the possibility of change and always left out hierarchical errors of reasoning that sometimes stunted fellow humanists. If she was tormented by the question whether writing changes things, I never heard her say it. She believed in political action. And in her work on behalf of refugees she pushed against evil in its most menacing visage in Australia and the contemporary world. Her loss leaves a space we cannot fill but — I can hear Rosie saying it — we must get on with it.”

Rosie’s family would like to extend an invitation to all those who knew Rosie at the ASA, to her memorial service which will be held this Sunday (21st May 2017) at 2 pm at the  Marrickville Town Hall.

 And here is Rob O’Neill’s interview with Rosie from the August 1996 issue of Quote Unquote, in which she comes out against malice and in favour of sex and exuberance. So Rosie.

Sand in the machine

The Economist reports that sand is in demand:

India’s “sand mafia” is doing a roaring trade. The Times of India estimates that the illicit market for sand is worth around 150bn rupees ($2.3bn) a year; at one site in Tamil Nadu alone, 50,000 lorryloads are mined every day and smuggled to nearby states. Gangs around the country frequently turn to violence as they vie to continue cashing in on a building boom.

Much of the modern global economy depends on sand. Most of it pours into the construction industry, where it is used to make concrete and asphalt. A smaller quantity of fine-grade sand is used to produce glass and electronics, and, particularly in America, to extract oil from shale in the fracking industry. No wonder, then, that sand and gravel are the most extracted materials in the world. A 2014 report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates they account for up to 85% by weight of everything mined globally each year. [. . . ]

Sand may appear plentiful, but is in fact becoming scarce. Not all types are useful: desert sand is too fine for most commercial purposes. Reserves also need to be located near construction sites; as transport costs are high compared with the price, it is usually uneconomical to transport sand a long distance. That, though, does not stop countries with limited domestic resources (and deep pockets). Singapore and Qatar are big importers; the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai was built using Australian imports.

I have stayed in the Armani hotel (someone else was paying, obviously) at the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and been to the outdoor observation platform on Level 148, 555 metres up: I would not have been so confident had I known it was a hotel built on Australian sand.

So here are Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra in 1968 from their timeless album Nancy and Lee:

Waikato Times letter of the week #77

Aka The Cat in the Hat: the sequel. In the previous instalment, Waikato Times Letters of the week #76, four of the paper’s readers upbraided columnist Peter Dornauf for his column of 17 April in which he complained about the Tauranga Citizens’ Club asking him to remove his hat for luncheon. Today came a letter from the president of the TCC giving its side of the story:

Dornauf’s hat

In response to Peter Dornauf’s editorial (April 17), the Tauranga Citizens’ Club executive, management, staff and members endeavour to welcome all our members, their guests, affiliated members and their guests into our club.
 The receptionist on duty on the day in question asked Mr Dornauf to remove his hat as our rules do not allow hats to be worn in the club room unless the hat is for a good reason eg medical, religious or for themes such as the Melbourne Cup.
 Mr Dornauf refused to remove his hat and the manager was then asked to come to the counter. The manager also asked him to remove his hat, he again refused and asked why he should, was again told that those are the rules and the club employs the staff to ensure the rules are upheld.
 If any of our people visited Mr Dornauf at his private residence (clubs are private) and were asked to remove their hat or shoes which could be part of their identity, they would not hesitate to do so as a show of respect to the hosts.
 The manager asked his partner if he wore his hat at their dinner table, she said no, but yet wished to wear it at ours.
 Mmmm go figure. 

Stephen Hawkings

President

What I’m reading #144

Get out your tissues: Robin McKie at the Guardian reports on Monty Python’s Terry Jones and his dementia. Quote unquote:

It is also obvious he gets strength from the presence of [Michael] Palin. Towards the end of our interview, Jones reaches out to grasp his hand, giving it a good squeeze. The pair hold hands for a couple of minutes, a gesture that perfectly reflects their 50 years of friendship – and its importance in sustaining Jones through his tribulations.

Harry Eyres at the New Statesman on my magazine-editor hero Alexander Chancellor. Well, not so much on him as on what happened to the Spectator after he left. Quote unquote:

Alexander was a brilliant and unconventional editor whose methods derived from Chinese Taoism: he achieved miracles while appearing to practise wu wei, or “do nothing”. In fact, Alexander operated instinctively, sniffing out writers whose style he liked and encouraging them, regardless of political viewpoint.
The effect was to rescue an ailing publication and set it on a course of unwavering success. Those who credited him with setting the tone of the modern Spectator, of making it readable, irreverent and witty, were partly right.
But the Spectator began to deviate from his liberal, civil open-mindedness only a few years after he stopped editing the magazine in 1984. This deviation took two, perhaps related routes. The first was a hardening of the paper’s political stance, first making it into a Tory organ (Alexander was never in his life a Tory) and then into a right-wing-of-the-Tory-party, brexiting rag. The second consisted of the introduction of a casual, jokey, faux-macho incivility – a malign mutation of Alexander’s irreverence – aimed at shocking the liberal bourgeoisie.

Two words: James Delingpole.

Dany McLauchlan at the Spinoff on Max Harris’s The New Zealand Project is the best book review I have read in years. It takes the book seriously, presents its arguments fairly (as far as I can tell, and anyway I trust him) and you’ll never guess what happens next. Devastating because Danyl knows the territory so well and is sympathetic to the views expressed – just not this book. The material on framing is brilliant: why, it’s as if he has spent years around political parties. Quote unquote:

If you pay more attention to politics, and read online commentary, or go to political conferences, or progressive hui, and listen to more brilliant left-wing intellectuals agree on What Must Be Done, it gradually becomes apparent that the progressive left has the answer to every problem in politics, except for the problem of how to actually persuade voters to listen to them, and thus affect meaningful political change. Which is a shame, because without that all the other grand ideas are pretty futile. All the talk about What Must Be Done starts to feel less like activism and more like a form of fantasy roleplaying, only instead of pretending to be dragon-slayers, or vampires, progressive intellectuals pretend to be people who are relevant to contemporary politics.

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian on Warren Beatty’s new vanity project Rules Don’t Apply: Quote unquote:

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that we cannot experience death because death is not an event in life. But then Wittgenstein never had to sit through this unbearable new film from Warren Beatty, his first in 15 years, co-written, produced and directed by its star, Warren Beatty, who may well be affecting a kind of kinship with his subject, the crazy but allegedly lovable billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. Beatty may also like the low lighting Hughes favoured.

Kate Mossman in the New Statesman on how Mayte Garcia found married life with Prince. Quote unquote:

I’m on the phone to Prince’s first wife and I’m trying to picture the wrestling. He had a very strong upper body, Mayte Garcia says brightly – but she had very powerful legs. “When he knocked me down, I would take my legs around his body and squeeze really hard. So he stopped tackling me down to the floor.” She doesn’t know why they wrestled – couples do weird things, don’t they? Like the hypnosis. In her new book, she says she loved the hypnosis because it was the only time he’d let her talk without interrupting her.

 Stuff reports that, sadly, Wellington diners may have to wait even longer for Jamie Oliver to open a restaurant there. They are possibly not missing much. He has, says Stuff, “42 Jamie’s Italian restaurants in the UK and more than 36 abroad run under his name.” Tanya Gold was not impressed when she reviewed for the Spectator Oliver’s latest London venture, Barbecoa at 194 Piccadilly, overlooking my favourite church, St James’s. Quote unquote:

I used to like Jamie Oliver, or the idea of him. I liked his willingness to be a spokes-chef; to damn parents who feed their children Turkey Twizzlers and roof insulation; I liked that he is fat. Then I ate at Jamie’s Italian in Soho and met a plank resting on two tins of tomato paste bearing greasy salami and cold cheese, and steak frites that thought they were Italian, and I stopped liking him.
 I began to think him cynical and money-grubbing. There is a peculiar depravity to the mid-market family restaurant in central London that offers bad value through a good name, and I cannot forgive Jamie for pretending he was different; for pretending, as he ripped up basil with his bare hands and told men, yeah, you can cook, that he was my mate. (That is the evil of television. Fake intimacy.) The dish may have been called Jamie’s Plank, but I do not remember. I hope it was. It should have been, even if the plank was me.

 The Economist on the hidden data on your airline boarding pass. Quote unquote:

All of this goes to show that yes, airlines should probably not make data available through a barcode scanner that they don’t want to make available on a printed boarding pass. And yes, you are probably better off using an electronic boarding pass on your phone, inconvenient though it may sometimes be. But the biggest takeaway is simply that your personal data are a lot easier to hack than you probably think. A wide range of seemingly harmless slips of paper, containing your name and an identifying detail or two, can open you up to a hacker’s attack. So the next time you check for your personal belongings as you exit a plane, you might want to make sure your boarding pass is among them.

 So here are Black Sabbath in 1970 with “Paranoid”: