Hamilton is a dump too!

O Hamilton my Hamilton!

We went to the lake front playground, where some of my fondest memories are set. When we parked and got out, my heart broke. What a run down, soul destroying place. There are three playgrounds, now, all separate. One of them seemed to be the weekend project of some DIY hack. There were plywood panels bolted to parts of the climbing areas. The metal was worn and rusted, the rubber matting underneath was cracked and ripped.

The grass was long. The toilets smelled icky from fifty feet away. The rubbish bins were overflowing. There is what appears to be a construction site there, but it looks as if the contractors gave up and left three months ago.

The steam train is still there but gone is what felt like the longest slide in the world.

It has to be said that the clientelle has deteriorated considerably. Now, it feels like an unsafe place, with dirty little thugs skateboarding, spitting all over the place and seething with contempt for anyone who gets in their way. Perhaps their iwi now owns the land and we are nothing but intruders.

The drinking fountain was clogged up with rotting water.

The play equipment was tired and colourless. There is what looks like a thick plaited rope which is supposed to be a swing.

I could go on. I probably shouldn't.

I loved that place. I love the memories I have of it. I guess like so many other things those memories will have to remain as they are, isolated in time.

Silly me to think that my past could be revisited. I am rooted in my past, but as the things of my past disintegrate little pieces of me are chipped away, too, until perhaps I will become as desolate and meaningless as the once beautiful snippets of my previous existences.

Wellington is a dump!

Wellington is a dump! 460,000 people can be wrong. What a hole.

The streets are narrow and windy. They meander directionlessly through wild scrub and forest. They have paved mountain-goat tracks, slapped small roundabouts on them, and called them roads. People park on the side of the road. Their cars have side-swipe marks along the panels. The roads are so steep most gearboxes can't handle them. And did I mention how narrow they were?

The malls suck! Both of them. Actually, one more we didn't visit. Christchurch has five malls. All but one are wide open, spread out affairs with ample parking (well, mostly) and lots of shops. The malls in Wellington are crap. Mall developers in Wellington forgot that people drive cars to malls and need somewhere to leave their car while shopping. Hello!

Porirua. Scary. Talk about run down. Claustrophobic. It's heard to describe it withour breaking several race relations regulations. But it reminded me of growing up on The Block.

I remember thinking when I was younger that Wellington looked like a dump. I didn't visit this place until about 1995. That was an overnighter, and the lasting memory was a depressing place down town where we ate lunch.

I can't stand how you can be driving on the motorway, in the middle of Wellington, and be completely surrounded by bush, hills, and scrub with not a house or building in sight.

I can't believe what a depressing place this is. Our nation's capital! Whose brillaint idea was it to not only build a city in the hills, but to make it the capital?

Spies among us

If there isn't more of this going on behind the scenes already, then I think there should be. How naive would we be to think there are not spies among us all the time. Every major corporation should have paid informants in competition companies. The police should have contacts in every grass roots and international organisation - Greenpeace, Amnesty, PETA et al - that has ever raised its head above the surface.

I think the worst part of this debacle is that they guy got caught. He should have been more careful, and I think our tax dollars should be spent on clever people, not idiots.

And of course, the one who sprung this on us is not beyond reproach. Her timing does seem a little contrived.

Information is power, and I have no problem with the police spending resources keeping tabs on these activist groups, and who's sleeping with who in the organisation. They need to be fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the group.

Scary times

I grew up in the seventies. The overwhelming theme of that time, at least for me, was the crushing threat of a nuclear war. I had heard terrifying stories of WWII, so as we teetered on the brink of WWIII my subconscious convinced me it would be even more terrifying and dangerous and calamatous than WWII. Surely. Logically.

I imagined that at any given moment the bombs would start going off and the whole world, especially my localised, intimate one, would be plunged into a morass of plague, death, disease, famine, violence and struggle for existence. Every second of every day I was terrified WWIII would come to my doorstep.

I guess that shapes a child's psyche. I think in my case it instilled a deep sense of terror, which bled over into a number of aspects of my life. Coupled with some other personal circumstances, I grew up with a healthy fear of nearly everything.

Obviously, WWIII did not happen. It took many many years for me to wake up in the morning and not presume today was the day. Whether it was maturity, common sense or apathy, I don't know, but the fear of nuclear war had evaporated.

Of course, I am now much older and wiser and calmer. But I have of late felt twinges of that old fear I had as a child, that all encompassing terror that at any moment catastrophe is going to befall me. And the threat is no longer nuclear war, but the GFC. Every news cast on every channel, every hour, every day, the doom and gloom about the Global Financial Crisis is tapping into my childhood fears about the imminent nuclear holocaust. Now the fear, still completely self-centric, is just as personal. What if I lose my job? What if I am bankrupt? What if I am evicted? What if I have to live on the streets? What if I can't feed my children? What if get sick? What if I have to resort to delivering pamphlets to earn a bit of money?

It's funny what you bring with you from childhood.

Self-centred and arrogant to the last

There are a hundred things that stand out in the last 24 hours, not the least of which is that we have finally divested ourselves of the lily-livered, limp-wristed left-leaning socially inept Labour losers. Of course, I hardly expect John Key and his National cronies to do much better, but who could do worse?

But the thing that really stood out for me was how Queen Helen was self-centred and arrogant to the last. According to numerous commentators, John Key held back a little to allow Clark time to get to her people and make her speech. He needn't have bothered. To her last breath it was all about her. Her announcement that she was stepping down as Labour leader was a guaranteed front page winner, a thunder stealer, and tantamount to packing up her toys and leaving the sand-pit, and thumbing her nose at us all. I didn't buy for a second her disingenous "respect" for the NZ people who voted her out. She hasn't respected us for the last 9 years, and the 20 before that. Why does she suddenly respect us? Yeah right.

And of course, the media bought into it. TVNZ cut the end of John Key's speech to go back to Mark "ooh look at my big moustache" Sainsbury's inane comments. And Queen Helen's sand-pit tantrum made the front page of the SST. I'm sure she rubbed her hands reading it this morning while sipping her breakfast Moet with that awful, arrogant, half-sneer, half-sucked lemon leer she's perfected.

Today we got to see the lefty commentators for what they really are. Whingeing, whining, bitter sore losers, the chief of whom is this guy. You should have seen him on Eye to Eye (I found it kind of pathetic how he announced he was going to be on the show in his blog). He was grunting and scoffing and interrupting and being beligerent, sucking up to Chris Trotter. And don't get me started on Chris Trotter. The Left's 9/11?? Helen lost because men on the right "couldn't cope with the idea of being led by an intelligent, idealistic, free-spirited woman". Good grief. Didn't have anything to do with Labour's sanctimonious intrusions into our private lives? Didn't have anything to do with their wanton theft from hard-working New Zealanders so that their beneficiary buddies (and not only thise in the Green Party) can be kept in hooch? Didn't have anything to do with the snubbing of our international friends, who have been friends for hundreds of years, and the parasitic coupling with cultures and economies that would bleed us dry then slit our throats becasue we are no longer of use to them? No, couldn't be any of that. We just don't want to be led by a woman.

Of course, the clarificatioin of Clark's gender is still up for debate.

Sarah Palin. Now there's a woman "men" wouldn't mind being led by. I could handle watching her on the news every night.

ass-u-me

"We should assume there isn't intelligent life out there."

It's this kind of grammatically incorrect, arrogant, self-centred, narrow-minded thinking that fuels my contempt for the entire scientific house of cards the white-coated stiffs have built.

Has this guy never seen a single episode of Star Trek?

"We see no evidence based on evolution on Earth for a tendency to develop human-like intelligence."

I should hope not if this idiot represents the most intelligent of our species. He seems to be presuming that "intelligence" is limited to the small amount of space found between human ears. He seems to be suggesting that if it hasn't "evolved" two legs, two arms and a rock-melon-like brain, it can't be intelligent. Or at least it can't be intelligent like us.

How many times did Kirk and the team, while cruising the cosmos, come across some incredibly clever being that resembled a big sparkly dust cloud? And it talked, and calculated and everything! Or what about Q and The Continuum? While they could take human form, they didn't really look like us. And they were omnisciently clever. Even cleverer than Pickard. And that's saying something.

And then there are the aliens from War of the Worlds? They weren't particularly clever when it came to fighting off the bugs, but they were wicked smart at building machines and weapons. And although we didn't really get a good look at them, I don't think they were human-like.

It astounds me that these science boffins can't think outside the square to a scenario involving intelligence in a non-human form, like a sparkly cloud or a handsome but overly-sarcastic omnipotent shape-shifter. And who says only an earth-like planet revolving round a sun-like star can sustain life and intelligence?

Of course, I didn't hear the lecture, and given that the media in this country are as brainless as most of the scientists, the report could be wrong, or at least incomplete. But I've heard a number of times some kooky biochemist suggesting that intelligent life cannot possibly exist somewhere else in the Universe because the conditions required to facilitate evolution are not evident.

Duh.

On this we're taking a bath

Let me add my voice to the outcry over this bastard Labour government attempting to limit the water pressure in our showers. How dare they. How $@*&^%% dare they!

This government has to go. But I'm afraid they won't be going because John Key is really starting to show his inexperienced moronic colours. He caved on the anti-smacking bill when he could have done what he was supposed to do. Be the opposition!! And god forbid, actually listen to the NZ public.

Sure the economy's tanking, crime is on the rise, health is down the toilet, education is a joke. Like sheep we just bleat from the cheap seats, knowing that as Joe average NZ citizen we are absolutely powerless to do anything to stop the political monster that the elite has created. Hence the growing - smouldering, festering - sense of resentment and rage that something like this shower thing illustrates. We accept that the government sits around all day thinking up new ways to torment us, to play with our lives to feed their egos. But when something happens so close to home, like the anti-smacking bill, and the government steps inside our home, we feel just how powerless, and at their mercy, we are.

Democracy would be nice, but democracy is a myth. It doesn't exist. The rich elite have always held the power, and they always will.

The economy is denuded and average families are struggling. I guarantee the politicians will vote themselves and accept a 15 or 20 per cent pay rise. Their expenses increase by inflation plus ten. John Key can take time out in his $5m house in Hawaii. Queen Helen can spend $40m on her own personal tramping ground and call it conservation.

I'll bet the water pressure at her house is good.

Money go-round

Two things have been bugging me for the past couple of weeks. They're entirely unrelated . . . or are they?

The US Congress has finally passed the $700 billion bank bailout. Which is good, I guess, for civilisation as a whole. I'm in the school that says if the US goes under we will all go under and Western civilisation as we know it would change irreparably. Very few people can claim to have lived in times when the fabric of civilisation changed overnight.

Now, while the stock market was struggling, it was continued to be buoyed somewhat by the deep seated knowledge that common sense would prevail and the US government would save the economy with the much needed boost.

But they said "NO!" And stocks began to plunge as the market crumbled. Once valuable shares plummeted in value.

Imagine this dark corner conversation between an average US politician and his brother-in-law:

"We're going to vote no on the first draft of the bailout bill."
"But that will . . ."
"I know."
"So you want me to . . ."
"Yes."
"But . . ."
"Then next week we're going to vote yes on the bailout bill."
"Ah, so then we can . . ."
"Yes."
"And we never had this conversation."
"What conversation?"

There is only one constant in this market. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

I think I'll get to the other thing that's bugging me tomorrow.

My Kingdom for a Trust Fund, four houses, shares, and a chauffer driven BMW

Have you noticed how every now and then the news pops up that this MP or that MP has this amount of shares or that number of houses around the country? And don’t get me started on the perks they get.

John Key is “independently” wealthy, of course. We know intimately about his riches. Apparently he bought a “holiday house” in Hawaii for a mere 5,000,000 dollars. But I wonder, too, how much of his mammon has been accumulated on the backs of hard working, middle class New Zealanders? Who knows exactly where the shares in question came from?

Helen Clark apparently has a few houses to her name, and no doubt a significant retirement fund. And probably a healthy portfolio of shares. And a number of interests in trusts.

Winston Peters has interests in the WRP Family Trust. But nothing noted about the Spencer Trust, with which he apparently has some interest.

Most of them have Family Trusts. Of course, lots of people do. I wonder how many of their family members have trusts, set up to siphon funds away from public scrutiny?

And have you ever noticed that the representatives of the poorest countries at the UN and various other Global bodies are big fat cats dressed in expensive suits and are chauffer driven in the fanciest cars. While their people starve in the streets and children die of diseases that could be cured for three dollars? They vote to increase military spending by trillions of dollars.

There must be something in politics. They all seem to be doing extremely well. I wonder if they worry about the power bill, or if the food will stretch ‘til next pay day.

With hundreds of dollars a day in allowances and a running tab at Bellamy’s, I doubt it.

Please Miss . . . can you spank me

Ah . . . I love it when stupid, ill thought out policies are shown up to be just that.

Who but the dimmest among us could not have predicted the dilemma now facing an Auckland primary school? A teacher has been moonlighting as a prostitute. And now the wowsers are wringing their hands, wondering what to do.

They can do nothing! It’s legal. End of story.

The school, the Board, the Ministry, the courts – none of them can make a moral determination that would prohibit her from shagging whoever she likes and getting paid for it.

Unless it is affecting her duties, says the Teacher’s Council. And I wondered how that might look. Does she turn up to class with that profoundly satisfied but unnervingly goofy looking post-orgasmic grin on her face? When she opens her purse in the staff room do condoms, an assortment of vibrators and a ball-gag fall out? Does she get texts from tricks during story time?

I’m assuming not.

Is she engaged in “conduct that brings discredit to the profession”? No one has established which profession she might be discrediting. Perhaps prostitutes who moonlight as teachers are regarded as the black sheeps of that fine profession. And some of the teachers I have known are the grumpiest, bitterest, most cynical mean spirited apathetic people around. It’s okay for them to teach our kids?

The Board’s hands are tied, although that would probably cost extra. And apart from giving new meaning to the parent-teacher evening (I’ll bet her schedule is filled with concerned fathers months in advance), you’d be hard pressed to disqualify her from her secondary employment.

Unless, of course, she is engaged in that most despicable, anti-social criminal of activities – failure to pay the correct taxes.