Do as I say, not as I do

Like many of you I have a smartphone that regularly posts alerts of news as it happens with succinctly-written pop-ups. This service is an unsolicited add-on if you have downloaded the apps of NZ Herald, One News and Stuff. The brief messages are invariably tidings of bad news with murders, car crashes and violent assaults dominant.

It’s part of our human nature that compels us to eagerly absorb these catastrophes.

We read recently where suicides are reaching almost epidemic proportions and I fear our constant diet of doom and gloom wouldn’t be helping this sad statistic.

It’s no good blaming the news media, they simply serve up what the public demands. I must confess when I go into a supermarket or other places where newspapers are sold I peruse the front page to decide whether to buy or not. A salacious headline is likely to positively influence my purchase.

I had first-hand experience of this some ago. I used to subscribe to a newspaper called Challenge Weekly. This was published by some evangelistic churches in Auckland and the content was most uplifting. I had a call from the editor one day who had noted I was the only subscriber in the Wairarapa and wondered would I perhaps like to become their agent down this way and see if I might increase their reader base. I agreed, but made no sales. It seemed no one wanted to hear the good news. Sadly, I too tired of the praiseworthy narratives and eventually let my subscription lapse.

Challenge Weekly is available on line and I note that to maintain interest it is now inclined to run the occasional adverse article.

But let’s examine last week’s bad news stories. Apart from the sombre suicide statistics one correspondent believes we are on the brink of World War Three. Another news item warns us that Germany’s Deutsche Bank is teetering after receiving a $US14 billion fine from the U.S. Department of Justice which could evolve into another global financial crisis. Poor old Pumpkin Patch, once one of this country’s most admired stores, has announced its own financial crisis and owes the ANZ Bank a small fortune.

Americans are reeling over the possibility that the worst possible president imaginable might be elected to lead the free world. There is little comfort in the fact that failing this, the second worst possible person to be president will be elected instead.

Closer to home Auckland holds this country to ransom with its various crises that include house prices which must inevitably collapse to the detriment of the whole country, and poverty stricken children and citizens living in cars and on the street. They then elect a man, whose own political party didn’t want a bar of, to lead them to the Promised Land.

North and South magazine recently called them “The city of fails.”

Re-reading this I realise I am hoist by my own petard. Having complained that the media is only interested in conveying bad news stories, I have done the very same thing myself.

Reminds me of the old saying; “If you can’t say something good about somebody - then let’s hear it!”

“Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news. Give to a gracious message a host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.” - William Shakespeare

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Smile, you're on candid camera

Many years ago I became acquainted with a part-Maori man named Robert who would often come into my office unannounced and tell me that God spoke to him. Initially I was sceptical, but I came to realise that the utterances, apparently from higher plain, were actually full of wisdom and were articulately expressed. So instead of looking for a reason to appear too busy to see him, I would resignedly accept his visits and listen to his dialogue.

I particularly remember on one occasion when he told me that on the previous evening God had told him that soon all crime would cease. The reason being, according to God, was the proliferation of video cameras; nothing it seems would ever be done again in secret. To some extent George Orwell had already forecast this, but 1984 had come and gone with little change in the crime rate. About this time the District Council had started installing CCTV cameras in the CBD so I thought there may be a grain of truth in this divine forecast.

I got to think about this last week when we were privy to the trial of an Australian named Gable Tostee who was accused of murdering a young New Zealand lady who had willingly strayed into his fourteenth floor apartment.

Thanks to CCTV footage the information available to the prosecution was mind-boggling. Warriena Wright’s and Tostee’s movements were readily discernible as they moved from place to place including a few minutes in a nightclub, buying beer at a bottle shop and then arriving back at the Gold Coast tower where Tostee, a carpet layer, was able to afford a luxury apartment. After Ms Wright’s disastrous fall Tostee was seen aimlessly wandering around the adjacent suburb and casually consuming a pizza on a park bench.

What God didn’t think to tell my friend Robert was that in the distant future a fellow named Steve Jobs would come up with an iPhone that not only had a video capability, but an audio device allowing the user to record conversations, secretly or otherwise.

Tostee recklessly switched on the recorder on his smartphone at some stage during the evening. Just why he would choose to do this when all manner of shenanigans were going on in his apartment has never been explained, but the outcome was that the whole evening was either filmed or recorded.

The ensuing banter and subsequent distress cries from Ms Wright, when played for world consumption in the courtroom, were particularly upsetting for her mother, Merzabeth Tagpuno.

The audio device did not just bring down Tostee. A man and his wife used it to record a ten-minute tryst between All Black half-back Aaron Smith and an unidentified young lady behind the door of a disabled toilet at Christchurch airport. Smith would have had a lot of explaining to do to his fiancée and the man who made the recording, and then blamed his wife for exposing it publically, says his marriage is also now under stress.

Meanwhile Steve Jobs is probably up there sitting at the left hand of God; they’ll both be shaking their heads and saying, perhaps in unison: “They reap what they sow.”

“If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery” – Michael Harrington

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Well I'll be doggone!

I’ve recently reached the conclusion that the keeping of domestic pets is an endeavour coming to an inevitable end. Last week we learnt that the Wellington City Council have offered to desex the city’s cats at virtually no cost to their owners. If the desexing programme is successful then within a few cat generations the species will have disappeared altogether.

Game, set and match to Gareth Morgan.

Cats aren’t the first in line. Circuses have lost their animals and Napier’s performing dolphins were returned back to the ocean some years ago.

The writing is clearly on the wall and so I sat the dog that totally rules our household down after I had seen the TV news item and told her that her days as a domesticated pet would appear to be numbered. Molly is a shitzu/poodle. She gets embarrassed when people shorten her lineage by linking the first four letters and the first three letters of the two breeds and I often wonder if I should be feeding her shitake mushrooms. That aside, I said I thought that seeing the dolphins had been released from their swimming pools goldfish would soon be banished from their endless bowls, and those folk with budgies, canaries and parrots would be the next to be ostracised, closely followed by guinea-pig keepers. Cats were now unable to multiply and so it would soon be the dog-owners turn to release their pets.

Although I couldn’t give her an exact timetable, I did suggest that I would start taking her around the backs alleys of the town and teach her how to forage for food.

She seemed a bit non-plussed. She walked me over to the ranch slider where her sheepskin rug is laid out allowing her maximum sunlight during the daylight hours when she is not sleeping on our bed and then back to the TV where she watches her favourite show, Animal Planet. Finally, with a typical canine gesticulation, she motioned towards the next door cat, who just happened to be lurking on the path above our house and was about due to have its daily exercise, by being chased back to its own confines.

It was perfectly clear that although the animal rights people felt she should be returned to her natural habitat, she was supremely happy with the life she had carved out for herself at my considerable expense. To emphasise the point she patiently watched me fill her food bowl with turkey flavoured morsels that look at least equal to what we are planning to have ourselves for Christmas dinner.

You might worry that thoroughbred horses are the next endangered species, but I think not. The racing industry pays huge taxes, and the TAB is one of the government’s smartest little earners. Although publicly abhorring games of chance it hypocritically promotes visits to these government gambling dens, so it’s my contention that sporting animals will be totally exempt. If most dogs are deemed to be doomed then Molly will have wished she was born a greyhound.

Dogs are supposed to be man’s best friend, but when did you ever have your best friend spayed or neutered?

“Why is a lobster any more ridiculous than a dog - or any other creature one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters: they are peaceful and solemn, they know the secrets of the sea, they do not bark, and they do not eat into the essential privacy of one’s soul the way dogs do.” - Gerard de Nerval

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A fond memory

Entertainment back the 1950s, sans television of course, came in many forms, not the least being, in the summer anyway, the weekly swimming sports at the Dixon Street baths. This public swimming pool was situated opposite Trust House Memorial Park. They were known as the “men’s baths” though both men and women were admitted. Demure and sensitive women could bathe at the gender exclusive “ladies baths” which were at the northern end of Dixon Street. Despite the fact that female bathing suits became more revealing, eventually these baths lost their allure and were transformed into what we now call the Hosking garden.

A full house ensued every Tuesday at the swimming sports, due in great part to the final item on the programme, the diving. Two young men in their early teens were the attraction. One was Rex Malmo, a superb diver with a perfect physique, and Tony Ball. Tony was the antithesis of the well-coordinated Rex Malmo. After Rex had executed the perfect running one and a half somersault (for instance) Tony would appear on the board in outrageous clothing which could be a woman’s dress or a man’s suit, and with amazing dexterity run along the board and repeat the dive in the worst possible manner and have the crowd in stitches.

Other antics might include riding a bike off the board with an umbrella held aloft, or he could pretend to absentmindedly walk off the diving board into the pool, fully clothed and reading a book. Whatever, between the two of them, both great friends I gather, with their diametrically opposed performances they ensured a full house every Tuesday night.

Although he looked awkward on the diving board, to get away with what he did Tony needed to have perfect timing and a degree of athleticism that was possibly unrecognisable. This was how he escaped injury, despite the contortions of his performance.

He then used this uncanny ability to race motorbikes. At seventeen he was fast becoming a future Aaron Slight.

When not performing on the diving board or on his motorbike he was an unassuming person. He was in my class at Wairarapa College and we all had great respect for him. We would eagerly read about his exploits in Monday’s daily paper as he successfully competed on the race tracks around New Zealand each weekend.

Then the unthinkable happened. At aged eighteen he crashed and was killed in at the annual Wanganui motor-cycle meeting on Boxing Day in 1957 on what was ominously known as the Cemetery Circuit.

The funeral service was held at St. Matthew’s church on a Saturday morning; standing room only as the town and the college mourned the death of this larger-than-life figure. There wasn’t a dry eye in the sanctuary; it certainly advanced the maturing process of his classmates.

Nearly sixty years on and many will have forgotten his legacy. Anthony Charles Ball was an inspiration, and he helped brighten and influence our young lives. He was one of those characters that our communities seem sadly devoid of in these bland times.

Television, the iPhone, the iPad and the internet have all got a lot to answer for.

"I remain just one thing, and one thing only – and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician." - Charlie Chaplin

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The world's most expensive urine

t’s fascinating to think about the “miracle” health products promoted over the years that have come and gone. They have almost exclusively been advertised on radio and usually on those stations whose target audience is mature.

Let me run you through some of these vendibles.

There was bee pollen and then the new improved “potentiated” bee pollen. We had “Biomag;” an under-blanket peppered with magnets to ease back pain. There was “Body Enhancer” to help you shed weight (provided you also exercised vigorously, drank gallons of water and cut back on your food intake), a cure-all balm made from bee venom, (promoted by sports broadcaster Tim Bickerstaff who has since died) a hair restorer called “Follimax” and colloidal silver which I suspect if purchased would relieve you of lots of gold.

As far as I am aware most these products have exited the market as consumers became aware of the snake oil component of their claims.

All is not lost however. One door closes and another one opens.

One radio advertiser, acutely aware of a whole new and expanding market, circles in for the kill and offers an elixir that would warm the cockles of the hearts of MacBeth’s witches.

Lani Lopez sells a dietary supplement called Pez-Rez which she says is “dynamised.”

“Dynamised” must be the new word for “potentiated.”

Pez-Rez promises energy for the heart, brain, joint, prostate, breast and digestive health and supports fatigue and stress. The main ingredient is resveratrol. Popular broadcasters Leighton Smith and Mike Hosking both swear that resveratrol has improved their health markedly.

The medical profession is not convinced. One journal I read said: “Resveratrol is a stilbenoid, a type of natural phenol and a phytoalexin produced naturally by several plants in response to injury or when the plant is under attack by pathogens such as bacteria or fungi. Sources of resveratrol in food include the skin of grapes, blueberries, raspberries, mulberries and senna. Although it is often promoted as a dietary supplement there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that taking resveratrol affects life expectancy or human health.”

Professor John Dwyer is highly critical of the claimed palliative powers of these improbable potions. He suspects their sales success is due to the fact that people are simply hankering for a little “magic and mysticism,” and others think they can compensate for a destructive lifestyle by consuming megadoses of the supplements.

He accused users of listening to “misleading advertisements” and “drifting off into unscientific hands.”

General Practitioner Paul Koenig is even more scathing. He reckoned swallowing a whole host of these dubious substances is a complete waste of money and constantly reminds his patients who are concerned that their poor eating habits could mean they are missing out on essential vitamins and minerals that half the world’s population survives on rice and the odd vegetable. Only someone with an extraordinary bad diet would be vitamin deficient, he believes, and because the kidneys rid the body of superfluous vitamins quite quickly, most users are doing no more than creating “expensive urine.”

I wondered what Ms Lopez might have meant with the acronym PEZ and I came up with Perplexed Elderly Zone.

“Our body is a machine for living. It is geared towards it, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will be more effective than if you paralyse it by encumbering it with remedies.” - Leo Tolstoy  

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Contemplating a life of iniquity

I have decided that I am going to commit a crime. I’m not exactly sure just what sort yet. It will need to have an outcome that will advantage me personally, so I may rob a bank or a great train. I could lower my sights slightly. For instance it would be fun to steal say a Lamborghini, but I would probably need to go to Auckland to access one which would be a bit of a nuisance.

You may be wondering why, after a relatively blameless life I suddenly intend to embark upon such a distraction, but I have come to the inevitable conclusion that crime does in fact pay.

I’m not one of those people who think we should lock people up and throw away the key, but some of the sentences handed down these days, or not handed down in some cases, are farcical and no real deterrent.

I read recently about an accountant in Blenheim who robbed an elderly couple of $250,000, but had his sentence reduced because he had dementia. And then last week an heir to the Delegat winery fortune was given a mere $5000 fine and 300 hours of community service after brutally assaulting a policewoman. The crimes I intend to commit will involve no brutality and I reckon my whole family will willingly testify under oath that I have mild dementia; some will even go a step further and the report that the dementia is bordering on being severe.

Unfortunately I can’t remember which members of the family will actually say that.

My mother’s maiden name was Biggs and I’m thinking that the late Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs was possibly a relation, so perhaps it’s in my blood to set my sights on KiwiRail. It would be very easy to board the Wellington/Wairarapa train as it is always stopping - sometimes intentionally, often not - but I’m a bit perplexed as to where they might store all the money. I’m sure one of the conductors will willingly point me in the right direction, particularly when I tell him of my distant relative who, from memory, also ended up with dementia.

And anyway if I get caught, and even if I appear before a so-called “hanging judge,” given I have no previous convictions the most likely outcome will be home detention, which won’t faze me. I will be able to catch up on some TV programmes I’ve recorded, but never got around to watching. For example I don’t think I saw the last episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Also the leg bracelet will give the dog something to chew on.

I will get the lovely Nadia Lim to deliver her food bag daily and pay her handsomely from the money I stole from the train stashed under the mattress.

As I write this I am starting to get quite excited about my new career. I will use the cover of darkness in the Rimutaka tunnel to threaten the guard and rob the train and I will park my newly acquired Lamborghini at Maymorn to expedite a quick getaway.

There’s not a police car in the country that could catch me.

“I broke a mirror in my house which is supposed to be seven years bad luck. My lawyer thinks he can get me five.” - Steven Wright

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A mad Monday in Melbourne

I happened to be in Melbourne on the occasion of my 50th birthday. I was with a tour group of NZ meat retailers, about 40 in all, husbands and wives, seeing what we might glean from observing the craftsmanship of our Aussie counterparts.

My fellow travellers decided to put on a surprise party for me in the lounge bar in our hotel. I’ve should have known I was going to be the meat in the sandwich when I observed that most of the attendees had brought along their video cameras.

Half an hour into the celebrations the door opened abruptly and a rather large female burst into the room and demanded to know “Where’s Ricky!”

The revellers parted like the Red Sea leaving me in the middle of the room with all fingers pointing my way. The scantily-clad lady placed a ghetto-blaster on the floor, chained me to a chair and proceeded to strut her stuff dancing to an appropriate tune blasting from the cassette player. The video cameras worked overtime.

The raunchy Australians are apparently inclined to send a strip-o-gram to young men on their 21st birthdays; for 50-year-olds it’s a fat-o-gram.

Fortunately for all concerned our performer didn’t strip down completely, ending her erotic routine still wearing an over-burdened bra, skimpy bikini knickers and fishnet stockings.

Her final act was to sit on my knee, announcing she was going to kiss me and said if I put my tongue down her throat she would bite it off.

No such instruction was necessary.

A few months later I happened to walk into a pub in Geraldine. I was the National President of the New Zealand Licensing Trusts Association at the time and the CEO and I were visiting the South Island trusts. I was surprised at the attention I was receiving from the patrons standing around their leaners. They were all looking at me and appeared to be talking about me. One gentleman called me over and said “You’re that butcher fellow from Masterton aren’t you?” I allowed that indeed I was and he told me that the previous week I was the star on the big screen in the public bar.

It seems the local Geraldine butcher had his video camera at Melbourne and had proudly shown the pub patrons the main highlight of my fiftieth birthday party. The evening had been well advertised and was well attended

They all said they recognised me, only my face was more florid in the video.

Well it would be wouldn’t it?

This all came back to me last week when the NZRU blunderingly downplayed the seriousness of the Chief’s “Mad Monday” escapade and justifiably copped a fair bit of flak from a wide cross-section of the community.

I’m certainly not condoning what the reckless rugby team got up to with the hapless young lady with the unlikely name of Scarlette, but it occurred to me that from time to time boys will be boys and middle-aged men and women will also be boys.

But I was happy with my own conduct. Chained to a chair and with my hands tied behind my back, my behaviour was impeccable.

“Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.” - Marilyn French

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