Timeless

First published in Column 8 on the 8^th April, 1992

It’s a truism that as we get older the years seem to go by faster. Most of us have become used to it. But it’s pretty disturbing when kids who haven’t even reached their teens say that the years are going too fast.

When I was a kid, and no doubt when other people of my generation were kids, there seemed to be all the time in the world.

Time to spend all day doing things. Holidays lasted forever, and parents weren’t desperate for us to get back to school. A week was an eternity, and a year was such that you could barely contemplate it.

These days it’s not only the adults who suffer greatly from lack of time. Why?

The reason I ask, in my rather rhetorical way, is that I’ve felt as though I’ve been chasing my shadow all year. (And I don’t just mean Column 8 deadlines.)

Not only did the holidays shoot past before I could regain my breath, but I was plunged into the New Year in the same fashion as a stone tossed into a pool by a thoughtless boy, and ever since I’ve been trying to stop sinking.

Last year I had free evenings. Now they’re so cluttered I can hardly find to spare. And I don’t mean cluttered with family matters – I’m talking about outside things impinging on them; the evening meal is barely finished before it’s off to this, or quick, someone’s coming round.

Last year weekends seemed long enough to get at least one or two things done. Now they’re a frenzy of activity, driving someone in the family from A to B and someone else from C to D, and not forgetting to pick someone else from E on the way. That’s if all the best laid-out plans don’t slide into some totally chaotic schedule.

Which is why I ask where the time has gone, or rather, who’s snaffled it?

The telephone is one culprit. This creature is superlative for getting messages across quickly, but it’s major power lies in its facility for making last minute arrangements. ‘Yes, we’ll pick up so and so on the way – no, we’ve got plenty of time…’

The car is another time-consuming beast. There’s a paradox. The worst thing about a car, especially in Dunedin, is that you leave leaving till the last minute. Consequently, you try and fit something else into the time saved which means you’re worn out before you go where you’re going.

Television is bugbear number three. I find it a very unrelenting tyrant. It steals so much time you’d use better for something else; then those other things have to be squashed around it. Whole evenings (and cricket-watching days) can be sacrificed to the monster, while the more useful things you’d planned are pushed onto tomorrow, making tomorrow a nightmare.

Most of our labour-saving devices reduce the time taken to do the job, but insist on a payment – the eating up of real relaxation and leisure. Constant Sunday trading is another devourer, making real rest an almost extinct species.

This year I haven’t had time to make a New Year resolution, but now I’m determining to set aside at least half an hour a day just to sit around and do nothing.

Even if I have to get up at five in the morning to do it.

My 1992 self would perhaps be appalled at the lifestyle we now live, where leisure is practically a forgotten thing. You have to make time for it – if you can.

Then there’s the cellphone, streaming TV – and of course, the computer.

Photo courtesy of the Noun Project: aartiraghu

Blood Secret in Spanish...

My wife and I have been learning Spanish through Duolingo for around 600 days and have made some progress, but for the last few days I’ve been trying a different approach to learning the language. 

I haven’t given up on Duolingo – at present I’m using it primarily for the chess component, which is helpful even though I’m very slow to pick up on seeing what best to move. I think in a real game you’d have a lot more idea which pieces were where and how you’d got to the position rather than starting from the position and having to work it all out – which I don’t tend to do anyway. I use their tool of knowing which is the best piece to move, but that still catches me out at times. But I do enjoy the full games, which I often win. I think the bot is a bit odd, perhaps, in some of his moves...

Anyway, on the Spanish side of things I’d got to the point of feeling as though I was just going through the motions because there’s so little variation in terms of the style of lessons: either it’s a combo of reading a sentence, or translating a sentence (usually with the English words given randomly below), or writing a Spanish sentence only from hearing it (but again the Spanish words are randomly laid out to choose from, along with some ones that don’t belong). 

There are occasional vocab exercises, which are usually very easy, and tests where you have slightly less help overall. There are also stories to simultaneously listen to and read, but these don’t require a lot of input on the student’s part. And sometimes there are exercises entirely in spoken Spanish where you have only a modicum of an idea what’s going on. Most of the words go over your head.

However, I was having a snooze the other day and woke up with the idea of using AI (Grok on X) again. I'd used it before when I was trying to write in Spanish around a subject, and it took a huge amount of effort in spite of Grok’s endless encouragement and help. 

This time I had the idea of using one of the books I’d written – in this case The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret - and giving him a few paragraphs at a time to translate into Spanish, and then I’d work on the Spanish from there. I hoped that by gradually moving through the book the more consistent context would help me to grow more familiar with a consistent vocab (for the most part), and the way the Spanish words don’t follow the English format, and getting more familiar with phrases that can’t be straightforwardly translated into English – idioms, in other words, of which English has plenty too. And anything else that was useful.

Of course, Mr Grok (or maybe it’s Miss Grok), is infinitely helpful, going out of his/her way to offer suggestions, being willing to improve the translation where I didn’t feel it was quite cutting the mustard – no da la talla, in other words.

For the first time in a while I feel more enthused about keeping on with learning Spanish. Which is good. It’s not a criticism of Duolingo, which at least in the early stages is very good for getting the language under your belt. But after a while you find it lacks variety, it lacks a personal touch, it’s not good at explaining difficulties, and it doesn’t really teach you to speak the language for yourself.

Here are the opening paragraphs in Spanish: 

William Dylan Mumberson —normalmente conocido como Billy— calculó que había tenido  cuarenta y cinco cortes de pelo en su relativamente corta vida. Todos habían sido tranquilos y sin incidentes. Sin embargo, aquel jueves por la tarde en particular, su corte número cuarenta y seis resultó fuera de lo común.

No era porque el señor Frizzer, el dueño de la barbería, estuviera de vacaciones «tomando el sol ». El cartel en la puerta decía que regresaría en un par de semanas.

Tampoco era porque el sustituto no se hubiera presentado —como habían hecho otros barberos de reemplazo— ni porque no hubiera entablado  ninguna conversación. El hombre era alto y enjuto, y la bata de barbero que llevaba le colgaba floja de su delgada figura. Parecía haber aprendido el oficio en una escuela especializada en cortes de pelo extravagantes. Billy no dejaba de mirarse en el espejo  y se preguntaba qué diría su padre cuando volviera del trabajo. «¿Te has peleado con el cortacésped, Billy?», probablemente preguntaría.

La falta de conversación y el curioso corte de pelo no fueron las cosas que Billy recordaría más de su visita a la barbería aquel día. Lo que hizo memorable la ocasión fue el pequeño corte que recibió en la oreja cuando el barbero lo pinchó con las tijeras, justo al recortar los últimos pelos.

Allegiance

 First published in Column 8 on the 1^st April, 1992

 When you see those crowded terraces of monitors behind the newsreaders on television, you realise there’s no way all the news that’s available can actually get on screen.

The same thing happens with the newspaper services. Each day dozens of items fail to find their way onto the printed page because of lack of space.

I am reasonably informed that the following are some of the items that didn’t make it last week. I don’t claim to have verified their accuracy, so you’ll note that I often use the word ‘allegedly.’ I’ve been fascinated with the word ever since I read that a woman allegedly bit off her husband’s nose.

One report told us the real reason why banks have to collect tax on your interest. Rather than going to pay off our national debt, it is (allegedly) paying off the huge sum of money the BNZ (Bank of New Zealand) was found to be short when the present Government came to power.

The second item of interest is a little more trivial. We now discover that all the televisions manufactured since 1990 have a two-way transmitting ability. This means that if ‘they’ want to watch you watching them, they can.

Seeing you supping your savouries in front of the telly isn’t very exciting, so the makers of that Candid Camera-type programme (allegedly) came up with a profitable use of the system.

Watch out as you doze in front of Holmes: a maniac actor my break into your living room and shout ‘Boo!,’ upsetting your lukewarm cuppa into your lap, causing the cat to tear its way up the curtains, and your wife/husband/spouse/partner to crash the new crystal bowl into a pot-filled sink. The ensuing chaos is intended to provide El Cheapo television.

On another front, in an attempt to give new meaning the concept of job sharing, Fran Wilde, member of Parliament, has allegedly claimed that when – not if – she also becomes Mayor of Wellington, she will insist on wearing her mayoral chains in the House. Her aim is to clank them like the ghost of Jacob Marley at any debate with which she does not agree. There could be a lot of noise.

(I’ve always been impressed by another of Fran’s unreported remarks: Democracy is a matter in which government decides what is best for the people, however much petitioning the people may do.)

Transcendental Meditation devotees didn’t make the news this week, although allegedly they should have. While practicing their ‘flying’ exercises, a group of meditatees at the TM headquarters suddenly bounced up and struck their heads on the ceiling. All were treated for concussion.

However, one meditatee said, ‘I think the concussion gave me much inner peace.’

And talking of words like meditation, when the Association of Presbyterian Women’s conference was held in Dunedin last weekend, a break-away group allegedly questioned why it’s good enough for the Anglicans to have a female bishop, when they haven’t got a female moderator. To show superiority over the incumbent patriarchal model, they suggested the one elected should be called a Moderation.

And one more item from Dunedin. The new tiles in the Civic Centre are due to become a source of much controversy amongst the councillors. Subject to intense scrutiny from irritable ratepayers, who felt there was nothing wrong with the old set, they (the tiles, that is), have begun a melt-down process. Consequently, they may well have to be replaced with the lino taken out of the old mayoral loo.

(Allegedly this is the first of April.)

Fran Wilde

‘All the news that’s available’ was the catchphrase on one TV station for a period of time.

As of this date (30.1.26) the Presbyterian Moderator for the past year has been the Rev Rose Luxford. In fact, the first female Moderator, Mrs Joan Anderson, had appeared back in 1979, and she was an elder, but not a minister though female ministers had first arrived in 1964. Rev Luxford was the fifth female Moderator.

Rubbish

 First published in Column 8, 25^th March, 1992

With all the discussion about the placement of a new tip, I can no longer avoid putting my oar in.

An occasional trip to the tip is good for the soul. The artist in me even finds a certain aesthetic pleasure in it.

Doesn’t the sight of countless seagulls swooping and swerving make your soul sing? I could sit and watch them for hours if it wasn’t for the smell. (You will have noticed, of course, that the latest generation of seagulls have evolved a small peg-shaped flap over their nostrils which enables them to go about their work at the tip without inhaling the odours.)

Don’t the car bodies heaped four and five-storeys high give you a feeling that man is still superior to the machine?

And best of all, isn’t there a marvellous sensation of off-loading when you toss heaps of rubbish into the pit and see it chewed and mangled by raging bulldozers? All your cares and woes and gripes discarded and forgotten. Wow!

I’m just fresh home from a trip out to Green Island and my only unpleasant memory of the journey was the feeling that my car’s suspension was suffering permanent seizure because of the pot-holey road. These holes brought back memories of a trip to Milford Sound, where avoiding the craters in the road was about as easy as missing rain drops in a storm.

As a result of casting all my cares upon the void, I now have a clean and tidy shed, having managed to overcome sentiment sufficiently to throw out all manner of things that survived last year’s clean-up. (But not yet the picture with the broken glass – from my childhood – of the QE II’s predecessor.)

Humans have an amazing desire to hang onto things that have outlived their usefulness, as though one day we’ll find a purpose for all manner of broken bits and pieces. Yes, I know there are times when we wish we’d kept that spare wheel to replace the one that’s just fallen off the kid’s trike, or even grandfather’s rusty hoe-head with the withered handle.

Attics and basements full of junk have a certain romance about them: they’re always the places where you’ll find the treasured antique that everyone else in the family has forgotten, or the secret diary, or the key to a strongbox containing untold wealth.

The trouble is these sort of antiques and diaries and keys always turn up in other people’s attics and basements. In our case the rubbish around our house threatens to overwhelm us, and devour all spare space.

Modern persons (that doesn’t have half the ring of ‘modern man’) have to decide what items are junk so that they can jettison them without fear.

Built-in obsolescence means things are constantly having to be replaced (toasters, for instance) and there’s an element in us (as well as the toasters) that hates throwing away something which only a few years ago we paid good money for.

Our collection of fading television tubes, spare vacuum cleaner hoses, chipped chisels, and worst of all, quarter-full paint can, will all survive barely a week after take our own last trip on this earth. There’s a certain irony that most of us wind up buried under the same kind of earth as our worn-out material possessions.

At least we rid ourselves of the material that’s clung to us during the course of our journey once and for all.

Without rubbish, smelly or aesthetic, man is born, and without it he will die.

I told you tips were good for the soul.

Landfill, Riverhead,West Auckland.New Zealand
Notice how tidy it is compared to tips of the past. 
Courtesy GPS 56Wikimedia Commons

I’m a bit amazed that decisions over the placement of a new tip were taking place when this was written, nearly 35 years ago, and the decision is still in the process.

I’m interested to read that also at this time, care bodies were being dumped at the tip. That hasn’t been the case for two or three decades.

In spite of my making it sound as though we were hoarders, in fact, we were a relatively tidy family. Far more junk went out that was kept. Thankfully.

Tips are no longer called tips in New Zealand: they’re now ‘land fill.’  

Unsafe sex

First published in Column 8 on the 18^th March, 1992

Though it’s more than a fortnight since I first saw it, a news photo has continued to haunt me. In the background a group of students wait to enrol; closer to the camera a girl is carrying a basket of condoms, to promote ‘safe’ sex.

Let’s get  real. There’s no such thing as safe sex. Sex is dangerous, and you’d better believe it. And no amount of condominiuming between couples will help. While the attitude is ‘I’m all right as long as I wear a condom’ we’re missing a dangerous truth in sexual behaviour.

We have this notion that somehow the world has now grown up because we talk loudly about sex in every place and at every moment. Many would have us believe that in the past no one ever mentioned the subject, and that consequently everyone was quite ignorant. Piffle. Humanity has managed sex just as well in the non-promiscuous  times as in the promiscuous. The big difference in the former was that marriages and families were more stable, and societies weren’t plagued by nonsense about sex at every turn.

I said sex was dangerous. You think I mean pregnancies. Sure, they’re part of the matter, but to look at the world’s attitude to pregnancies would take another column. I’m talking about other dangers, such as being under the delusion that a quick one-night stand is okay. You might get by without contracting Aids, as long as you wear your famous condom. But no condom will protect you from the consequences that the purveyors of ‘safe’ sex don’t talk about.

The problem isn’t really the wearing of the condom or the contracting of Aids. The problem is treating another human being – male or female, it makes no difference – as though they were there merely for the first person who came along to have their way with them. In the end everybody involved is prostituted. Safe sex is prostitution under another name, only the price isn’t usually in dollars.

We all look down on the world’s supposedly oldest profession, but hopping into bed with all and sundry isn’t the slightest bit different. We’ve believed the lie that adultery and affairs and one-night stands and sleeping around are all somehow better than rape and abuse and pornography and other evil sexual practices. In fact, any form of sex that uses others is evil. And any form of sex that takes place outside of a committee permanent relationship is already debased.

We’ve mocked the idea of commitment for so long now, few of us think it has any worth. No wonder people today – and it isn’t just the kids – find it isn’t worth the struggle to hold onto something valuable when the going gets rough. There’s no encouragement to do so. In fact, we’re lambasted from every corner with encouragements to give up what we’ve got and go find something else.

The trouble is the grass is green on the other side of the fence for only a little while. And it has to be mown just as often.

I’m  not even a partially raving royalist, but it sickens me the way much of the media seems hell-bent on destroying the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana. The assumption is that no one, from pauper to royal, has a hope of sticking together for long, so let’s take the lot down into the gutter as quickly as possible.

Forget all the crowing about ‘safe’ sex at every turn. I want to start crowing about Unsafe Sex; sex that debases; sex that hurts and causes emotional pain (not just the bobby-sox pain that occurs in soap operas but real cutting twisting pain); sex that leaves lives in a shambles from which the only escape may be death itself.

Sex is dangerous.

 

The following two letters to the editor were printed in response to this column; I don’t have a date for one of them, and I don’t know if there were more. These are the only two I managed to keep a copy of.

 Sir – I would like to record my support for the contribution of Mike Crowl in the March 18 edition of the Star Midweek. It takes courage to go against popular conceptions. His remarks are something that should have been said long ago, most certainly by those who have a much wider range of influence. My congratulations to Mike, keep up the good work. I hope the message will reach much further than the area covered by the Star Midweek.

S B Harlow.

 

26.4.1992

Sir – I wish to thank Mike Crowl for Column Eight ‘Safe Sex’ (Midweek 18/3/92). Few, in spans of years have tackled this subject of sex with such clarity, so soundly in such truth. Many readers, especially those among the young, may never before have had the opportunity to regard the matter in such a manner. Mike Crolw has given in a short space, plenty to think about. This article should be published far and wide.

Mary Wickliffe

 

Slaters (also known as woodlice)

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th March 1992

To avoid the atrophy of the brain as I grow older, I continue to ask questions. Thus I often puzzle as to why slaters climb walls, especially in the morning.

Some gardeners may not think the peculiarities of slaters are worth considering. However, to me the slater is a much-maligned creature, worthy of more attention than it usually receives.

I’ve always had a lot of time for the slater, although I know many gardeners regard them as a pest. I think this view is wrong. (Is it true that the Chinese intended eradicating slaters next?) Slaters are humble creatures, never making a show of themselves.

You will not find them, like spiders, insisting on putting their webs across doorways to catch your hair first thing in the morning. You won’t find them going crazy in the rain like worms and spreadeagling across pathways. Slaters prefer anonymity and humbly hide themselves under the nearest something, be it wood, rock, or even weed.

Perhaps their treatment as pests gives a partial answer to my question: Maybe slaters are being driven up the wall? Condemned to live in rotting wood, or compost, they may have little self-esteem.

How would you feel in their shoes, reader, supposing they wore any? Since they don’t, they must courageously clamber barefoot through your compost. A slater never knows when some burly black beetle will tread on his toes, or when he’ll slip in the slime left by a slug, or find the earth move under his feet as a worm power-drives his way past.

And think of the things slater’s feet get into – rotting apples, mouldy carrots, the unspeakable remains of things that have already passed onto a better compost pile.

My dictionary barely defines them under ‘slater’ – that word belongs officially to a person who puts slates on roofs. Slaters appear as an afterthought – ‘another name for the woodlouse.’

No wonder they’ve changed their name by deed poll. When you check out the woodlouse, the description is of any of the various small terrestrial isopod crustaceans having a flattened segmented body and occurring in damp habitats. (I thought dictionaries were supposed to explain words.) A crustacean is of the mainly aquatic class Crustacea, which includes the tortoise, lobster and water flea.

In spite of being related to magnificent creations like the tortoise and lobster the slaters’ family escutcheon doesn’t do them any good.

So why should slaters be the namesake of a man who puts slates on a roof? Is it their colour, or the design of their shells?

Perhaps some primitive and imaginative entrepreneur once considered slaters might have an ant-like potential for working together: he envisaged thousands of trained slaters lifting slates straight up the walls of the house. Perhaps slaters now climb walls because of some deep instinctive memory of what might have been. On the other hand, maybe they’re merely checking to see if the slates have been put on right.

I’m glad slaters are small. Knowing that they’re related to lobsters might inspire people with peculiar palates – the sort who delight in dropping lobsters into boiling hot water and seeing them sizzle - to attempt to fatten them up. If people can eat frogs’ legs, a hardly sizeable delicacy, why should they stop at slaters?

Meanwhile, I ponder on slaters’ penchant for heights, and marvel that any creature could drop the equivalent of a 50-storey fall (as the slaters sometimes do when I’m trying to redirect them) and survive.

 

A slater (Armadillidium vulgare)
courtesy Franco Folini, Wikimedia Commons 

Armadillidium vulgare. Hmm, the first part of their scientific name is impressive, although speaking it out loud, with its 'dillidium' in the middle is a bit like a children's nursery word. But 'vulgare' - how rude. There's nothing vulgar about the slater/woodlouse. Plainly those who named him had no real sense of his excellent purpose in the world. 

Progress

First published in Column 8 on the 4^th March, 1992

Put progress in the driving seat and she takes some curious turns. This week we bought a four-slice toaster to replace the old two-slice job. The latter had indicated it was on its last legs by burning the bread alive after refusing to pop it up.

However, once we’d unpacked the new four-slicer, and tried to toast in it, we found that the bread sat up above the top of the toaster by a good inch.

Now the bread we use isn’t abnormally-sized. When you purchased a toaster in the past you could assume you’d fit the bread into the machine and get the whole slice cooked. You don’t expect to carry a slice of bread around in your pocket to measure the depth of toasters.

Wouldn’t you think that a manufacturer would build this machine to take ordinary sliced bread? Maybe it’s a weight-watching plot to get us all to eat less bread. But there’s a problem with that: what do we do with the inch we have to cut off the top (or the bottom, depending on which way you choose to insert your bread)?

Toasters aren’t the only item to have missed the march of progress. I remember Katherine Whitehorn, the English columnist, saying that taps were no longer made merely to turn on and off. Instead of being consumer-friendly – as things usually were, long before computers arrived on the scene -they’d become designer-focused.

You know the sort I mean – you go to turn the top piece, and it swivels and swivels. Eventually you realise that the swivel motion is merely a pretty design – the tap only works when you press it down firmly. When pressed, these taps then emit a gush of water which you may or may not have time to get your hands under. And some stay stuck on: you have no way of knowing whether it will eventually turn off again by itself or whether you’re wasting gallons of hot water – and being unecological into the bargain.

Some public basins have foot controls. They’re very water-economical, since most of us take so long to discover how the tap works that we give up in disgust and leave our hands unhygienised.

I didn’t intend to talk about design progress, but about progress of a different sort. What caught my eye during the week was a snippet about dwarf-tossing, that mediaeval-sounding fad that recently took some European countries by storm.

Seemingly, just as we thought we were on the right bandwagon by expressing disgust that anyone should toss ‘people with a physical difference’ through the air, because it was an ‘intolerable attack on human dignity’ and an ‘exploitation of the handicapped,’ we find that at least one dwarf has campaigned to have the whole thing continued.

This man’s livelihood was being threatened by those who viewed the ‘sport’ with distaste and had banned it. His company, Fun Productions, was in danger of going bust.

Now wouldn’t you have thought that he’d been the person to ask in the first place as to how he felt about being used as a mini-caber? I mean, does a dwarf normally walk into a bar and find himself (in the process of being hoisted on to his bar stool) catapulted through the air by some burly fool? Or does he get the idea creatively, and decide, like any other entrepreneur, that this isn’t a bad way to make a living?

After all, there are rougher sports, such as rugby league. I think if I was a smaller person, and inclined for a bit of a thrill, I’d go for dwarf-tossing any time. (With knee, elbow and bum protectors of course.)

Rugby league seems to do nothing but bring out the violent in anyone with a bit of muscle. And there ain’t no inflated mattress to land on when someone forces you to the ground by pulling your shirt, your hair, your eyes, or any other loosehanging part of your anatomy.  

What a fine line we tread between deciding what’s best for other people and trampling on their rights.

 

Four-slice toaster, though not the one we own. 
Photo courtesy of SimonTrew, Wikimedia Commons

(2026) We bought a new four-slice toaster recently after our previous one gave up the ghost, and have had no end of trouble with it. Of course it comes with fancy gizmos, but doesn’t actually do the job it’s intended for. The side I normally use has been turned up to full throttle since not long after we got the thing, yet apparently it chooses to produce the ‘toasted’ bread at whatever heat it desires. So a piece put in straight after the toaster is started up will come out light, as though it’s barely seen the heat. The next piece is likely to make up for the lightness of the other and be cooked to death, or, if the toaster’s in a different mood, it will somehow bake the bread so that it’s nicely-coloured but hard to the point where it cracks and crumbles when you try to butter it. My wife normally uses the other half of the toaster, and her toast is mostly what you’d expect: toasted bread. A sexist toaster, apparently.

Since this column was written many public taps (as in restrooms) have no visible means of turning them on or off: you wave your hands around like an idiot, trying to get the thing to start, and then out of the blue it starts when you least expect it, and you still don’t know what caused it to do so. Nor how to turn it off again.

Meanings

First published in Column 8 on the 26th February, 1992

Words have a funny way of shifting meaning when used by differing groups. In a news report this week the liquor industry claimed it is a reputable body. ‘We are the peak organisation working with alcohol and drug addiction and treatment.’ Check out that word, ‘reputable.’

In the same report, the Television Commercials ApprovalBureau rebukes the claim that a certain television ad depicts that association of drinking with water sports, driving and sexual or social success. Check out that word, ‘association.’

In the ad a group of youths are headed for the surf, but it takes longer than expected because they have to push their non-starting car. And when they get there, the surf is sulky and low. Meanwhile, an energetic young lady sits on the top of the car getting a sun-tan – I presume. It’s an ad for beer.

Look again at the TCAB’s rebuttal. Okay, there are no water sports, because the surf ain’t up. Even the best surfies would find this water flat. Okay, there’s no driving, because they have to push their car. Okay, there’s no sexual success. The young lady in question (who legally should have been over 25 when the ad was made but was in fact 23) isn’t seen drinking, and remains aloof on the roof, one might say.

However, we don’t have to see people doing something to have a strong suspicion about what they might do. Isn’t that what the advertising campaign by the police is  based on? The possibility that the person wandering around your neighbour’s property might not be looking at the flowers? (Unless, of course, the flowers are poppies.)

It’s only an assumption, but presumably these people in the ad would have gone surfing if the surf had been up. I suppose in these days of meditation, they might have sat and gazed adoringly at the waters. Presumably if the car hadn’t refused to start, they would have driven it. Or did they feel the exercise gained was a source of exercise to them, and that their sweaty bodies would ultimately delight in a dip in the briny?

I don’t think the young lady would have stayed on the top of the car for long either. In that sun, melanoma would be round the corner, if she hadn’t turned into a fried egg first. As for the sexual angle, we can infer little – that’s a relief – except to say that the young lady in question is certainly not a shy, retiring wallflower!

The makers of the ad said they had complied within the letter of the law. Sure, but many things got away with in the name of the law’s letter still have the spirit of lawlessness about them.

In a society that increasingly condemns drunken driving, why are we advertising booze on television at all, where it has the potential to be advertised most potently?

(And, to go off at a slight tangent, why, if we hate drunken driving so much, do pubs by law have to have such large areas of parking space? Do you seriously mean to tell me that each person leaves the pub with a sober chauffeur?)

I don’t think the Government really says what it means when it comes to liquor. They’re like a mother telling a child it can’t have any more sweets before it goes to bed, then popping one into the freshly-toothpasted mouth as the lights go out.

The only thing about the new advertising is that it’s blatant, instead of covert, as before. There’s a pitiful modicum of honesty in that.

And when are we going to hear from the feminists on the subject of alcohol. It seems to me that beer is regarded in the advertising world as a man’s drink, to the point of sexism. One of the new spate of ads confirms that alcohol takes pride of place over relationships: one country gent is reeling off to another the worth of his Auckland (wow!) girlfriend. In the end he decides he’d sooner stay down South. Why? Because the beer is better.

This kind of advertising goes a long way to improving relationships between the sexes. I don’t think.

At the end of the column (as opposed to the day), it’s all a matter of the meaning you give to worlds. When the liquor industry says it’s the peak organisation working with alcohol, check out the word, ‘working.’

 ()()(()()()())()()

Regrettably I haven't been able to track this ad down online. 

 

Trillions

First published in Column 8 on the 12^th February, 1992

We used to have a discussion in our house (of the more heated sort) in which my son insisted there was such a figure as a centillion. He was right: the centillion is one of those numbers that needs hundreds of noughts to make its presence felt.

However, who needs centillions, when the mere fact of a trillion is enough to make me want to sit down, my legs all atremble. I read that the United States is 3.8 of these (and probably more) in debt. $3.8 trillion! That makes our balance of payments problems look quite piffling, doesn’t it?

A trillion is a million million in the States – their billion is only one thousand million, so I’m informed. Only. No wonder their debt goes up faster than everybody else’s. (If you’re in the UK and they start talking about debts of £3.8 trillion, run for cover: Over there a trillion is a million million million, or a number trailing 18 zeros.)

All this exposition of erudition (that is, showing off), is merely leading up to sharing some figures I came across recently. If you thought that the arguments last year over ministerial flowers and MPs’ lounge suites were either the height of trivia or pettiness, then take a gecko at some of the nonsense that’s helped put the US federal spending into trillions of debt.

I take these figures from a book recently published in the States called The Coming Economic Earthquake, by Larry Burkett. I can only assume Mr Burkett knows what he’s talking about, being a native of the country.

In the face of national collapse – there’s something we could show the Yanks a thing or two about – the federal government spent $49 million for a rock and roll museum. (That’s getting up towards $NZ150 million.) Plainly King Elvis still has the hearts of some Americans by the purse-strings.

Talking about hearts, they only spent a paltry $84,000 to study why people fall in love. That’s a leap from the sublime to the ridiculous. (Yeah, year, I know: a lover’s leap.) I’d be interested to bone up on some of the findings in this case. Hopefully they weren’t taken from television.

There people only fall in love, it seems, so that circumstances will get in their way and cause them temporary heartbreak until the last few moments of the episode’s half-hour are up. Of course, if it’s a soap, next week they’ll be forced to fall out of love almost as quickly, and probably reveal that they have some dim dark secret that hadn’t previously been known about by either actors or scriptwriters.

Back to US spending. $19 million to study whether belching by cows and other livestock harms the ozone hardly comes as a surprise, but $219,592 to teach college students how to watch television? I thought most American college students would be beyond this teaching.

Actually that’s a little unfair. If people I know are anything to go by, many of them need to be taught how to watch television. First lesson is to know where the off-button is – you’d be surprised how hard that off-button can be to find. They also need lessons in discernment. This would help them appreciate that the sitcom they’re now watching is exactly the same as the four other sitcoms they’ve viewed in the last two hours.

Of course, the Senate spent a good deal of money on itself, $6.5 million between the subway system and the beauty parlour. But my two favourites were the following: $500,000 to study the effects of cigarette smoking not on people, but on dogs, and, wait for it, $46,000 to determine how long it takes to cook breakfast eggs.

Doesn’t that make you feel as though New Zealand is partially sane?

 

‘Take a gecko’ seems to have been an expression I made up, or else it’s a piece of very outdated slang. Google doesn’t recognise it at all. I possibly meant ‘take a geek,’ which actually is a piece of slang meaning ‘have a look at,’ and has nothing to do with dealing in any way with a human nerd.

As for NZ being partially sane, perhaps they in 1992, but I frequently see tweets nowadays on X (was Twitter) telling us how much has been spent by Creative New Zealand on various arts applications. In 2020 the Taxpayers’ Union summarised a number of the applications that were funded – you can read about them here.

Incidentally, the US national debt is currently over $38 trillion.

Larry Burkett’s book has apparently stood the test of time: his predictions didn’t always reach their target as far as the year was concerned, but for the most part they have come about as he said they would.

Values

First published in Column 8, on the 19^th February, 1992

The week the national secretary of the Principals’ Federation of New Zealand, Mrs Marilyn Yeoman, was reportedly concerned that a certain morals kit intended for use in schools should be getting some funding.

Curiously, her main concern wasn’t about the fact that she’d never heard of it, but about two other things. Firstly, the kit promoted the teaching of ‘traditional values.’ Secondly, the federation hadn’t been involved in the production of the programme, and she questioned whether it was ‘religious education’ in disguise.

Quite honestly, I think her concern might have seemed more sincere if she’d queried why the kits had been such poor sellers – only 30 in 10 years. Are they badly written? Out of date?

But to query them because they may have been ‘religious education in disguise’ seems to me to be a bit of a red herring.

(Note that the ‘religion’ in question will no doubt be Christianity. Some people in education have a real hassle with it. When one of my kids was in kindergarten, I was told that the kids wouldn’t be singing carols at Christmas, because it might offend someone who didn’t have Christian views. Never mind that it might offend me not to have Christmas carols.)

The producers of the kit say the programme promotes the teaching of ‘basic universal values’ as honesty, decency, purity, trust, faithfulness and chastity. I don’t see those values held dear only the religious; in fact, every time we have another murder, or rape, or child abuse case, or spate of burglaries, or when we see the divorce figures for the year, I have a feeling most people deep down are concerned with those values.

Do you get up in the morning, grab your newspaper or flick on the radio in order to enjoy the reports of what devilment has been abroad in the past 12 hours? I don’t think so.

I think most of us feel outraged at the constant curse these things are to us, rather than revelling in them.

If I was Ms Yeoman I’d be glad of anything that promoted honesty, decency, purity, trust, faithfulness and chastity amongst our kids. After all precious little of the entertainment on the box or in the movies these days promotes these values.

Rather, Hollywood and the television moguls seem hell bent on promoting every sort of vice and perversion that’s going, over and above their unrestrained attitude to sex and violence.

So, I’m puzzled why a spokeswoman for a teaching association should feel threatened by a programme that encourages the very things that most of us want as the norm in our society.

Surely she doesn’t still hold the outdated theory that all children are born perfect and it’s society that comes along and upsets their equilibrium, turning them into naughty little creatures. Or that there are no moral absolutes, and we must take every situation as it comes along and then decide what’s right. I would have thought that kind of woolly thinking had gone the way of the dodo.

Anyone who’s ever brought up kids will know that there’s a struggle going on in them all the time, a conflict between wanting to do what’s right and winding up doing what’s wrong.

Maybe the Principals’ Federation needs to take this kit under its wing, rather than rejecting it. New Zealand’s kids can do with all the help they can get.

"The darkest corner of hell that is reserved for
those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
Courtesy: Hasanisawi, wikimedia commons

 Almost 36 years later and this column remains as valid as ever, particularly since our society has gone so far down the tubes in the meantime, basically by gradually eroding all sense of honesty, decency, purity, trust, faithfulness and chastity – and other values – and mocking those who try and keep to them. And yet, day after day in the newspaper (I no longer watch the TV version of the news) or online we have people who plainly do understand the morals on which our society is based, and rail against the way in which they are being undermined at every turn by people who ignore them.

I just came across a quote by G K Chesterton, on X (Twitter) which seems apt:

Public education has not produced an educated public...

Eradicate!

First published in Column 8 on the 22 January, 1992, and about as random in relation to the topic as I ever managed to be. 

A reader of today’s papers and a watcher of today’s news might be forgiven for thinking that the old proverb had been turned on its head – good news is no news.

Nevertheless there are occasional spots of good news amongst the bleak pages – and amongst the trivia that frequently passes for news on television.

For instance, I realised that Saturday’s Situation Vacant in the ODT took up four pages. I can’t be sure – since I’m only a columnist and not a journalist – but I don’t think there have been quite so many jobs advertised for some months. And I don’t think it’s just because the bigger ads took up more space.

A careful reading of the jobs advertised, however, does produce some surprises. I guess those who indulge in these professions know what they are, but doesn’t your imagination take great leaps forward at what an Abrasive Blaster might do, or a Car Detailer, or a Four-Colour Stripper?

The first sounds like he needs to read a couple of articles I’ve come across in Reader’s Digest, on dealing with anger and handling hassles.

Talking of great leaps forward, I see that the Chinese in Beijing have launched a patriotic campaign to eradicate flies. Details were not given in the report I came across, but no doubt they will go about it in their inimitable oriental fashion.

Apparently in 1958 Mao Tse Tung (that bureaucrat to end all bureaucrats) instructed his people to wage war on the birds that were stealing grain supplies. For hour after hour the ever-obedient people beat drums and metal bowls until the frightened birds dropped to the ground from sheer exhaustion.

Why the birds didn’t have enough sense to fly somewhere else for a while I don’t know. However, I’ve got more sympathy for the people. Banging drums for hours and hours on end sounds like the sort of work that only Ringo Starr or a toddler would endure with much joy. Haven’t we all had experience of one of our dear little darlings getting into the pot cupboard and turning it into a drum kit?

Just think if the characters in Alfred Hitchock’s movie The Birds had copied the Chinese example. The ending might have been quite different for several of them. (Incidentally, according to Halliwell, that doyen of film buffs, in at least one scene in this movie the birds proved their superiority over humans in a way the film-makers hadn’t intended. The birds were chasing a group of school children. The children cast shadows on the ground, but the birds didn’t!)

To get back to fly eradication: I’m curious as to the form of suppression the illustrious Chinese energy will take. Perhaps like Mr Myagi, that teacher of karate in The (tripartite) Karate Kid – yes, I know he was Japanese! – they will spend hours with a pair of chopsticks attempting to catch the flies on the wing. Since the Beijing citizens proclaim they are decimating the flies for the sake of hygiene, I suppose the chopsticks will be exterminated too.

Talking of karate, the wondrous summer weather brought out a group of karate-practicing men into the Queen’s Gardens last week. Their movements were marvellously disciplined, each stepping out in unison like long-legged birds fishing in a river.

Back to eradication. Perhaps there are more subtle oriental methods available, kept secret for thousands of years – or maybe a quick dash to the aerosol can will do the trick. However, if too many of these are used at once, couldn’t we have the possibility of a new ozone hole over the city of Beijing?

So what. here’s a chance for a new New Year’s export industry, if we get in fast. Send the people of Beijing some of the snuffing-out stuff that’s advertised on television, the stuff that ‘kills flies dead.’

Dead, as far as I know, is the only way anything is killed. Happy New Year!

Poster for the Four Pests Campaign, 1960
courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The eradication of flies was part of the Four Pests Campaign, which had disastrous effects on the country of China. It took place quite some time before my article was written.