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Debrief | Jan 24, 2005 11:09
I was a Big Day Out medical statistic. At about 6pm, I was having a rest in the bar and I remarked to my buddy John Russell that I had developed a little headache in the course of the past five hours, and I hoped it wouldn't get any worse.
"Go to St John's," he advised. "I just did. They'll give you a couple of Panadol."
So, on the way down to see Polyphonic Spree, I stopped off to see the medics. I had to wait a few minutes while a crew charged out the door of the caravan to where someone had apparently fallen, while a girl with a cut foot was discharged, and another bug-eyed girl departed after having apparently had a sit down, but I got my Panadol. But before I could depart, I had to provide details for the register.
Sex? Male, obviously. "Name?" Brown. "Age?" Er, 42 … Medical issue? "Headache."
"Good on yer, mate …"
Er, yeah. So, enter the Boiler Room. The 27-piece set-up for the Spree was running behind schedule, so we got about 20 minutes more Concord Dawn than expected - and they weren't half bad. Less of a bleeding cacophony than last year, more of a groove.
Eventually, it was time for the Polyphonic Spree. I liked the idea of some goofy choral groove following the drum 'n' bass attack, and I expected to enjoy it. But … I didn't. Perhaps I found the hands-in-the-air religious revival schtick off-putting, but I'm afraid I just didn't buy any of it.
So I convinced my companion to depart with me. We took in a little Shihad in the stadium: definitely Shihad again, and no longer Pacifier, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd seen it before. So up the steps and over to the alternative stages, where The Streets had a big and very up-for-it crowd - and didn't really take them anywhere. I love both the Streets albums, and I really rate Mike Skinner as a writer of words, but the live show was basically half-arsed and messy, and the stage patter wasn't funny.
So the big 7pm-8pm logjam had not, for me anyway, produced any real delights. There had been earlier highlights: I arrived earlier in the day just in time for Deja Voodo's set, where a notably large crowd was ironically throwing up the goat 30 rows back. Of note: Deja Voodoo now have a marijuana song ('Weed on Green Man, Weed on Green Woman') to go with their very popular songs about beer ('Beers') and P ('P'), and the words are very funny.
We skipped some earnest American punk rock band in favour of a sit-down in the bar, and got back for Phoenix Foundation, who, by their standards, fully rocked out. Not bad. But then, on the adjacent stage, Le Tigre: wow! The little girls in the crowd screamed and three New York riot girrrls played their enormously engaging feminist disco-punk, tossing in their crowd-pleasing cover of the Pointer Sisters' 'I'm So Excited'. It was funny and simple and uplifting. Instant highlight.
Back at the main stand, I briefly visited my kind corporate hosts, Ericsson, before popping down to the FMR box, where Paul was sitting, having scammed his way into a government box, which was playing host to a posse of Labour MPs. Steve Maharey, apparently, got down amongst the people for The Hives, and I saw Tim Barnett, in a lurid red shirt, handing out cheesy 'Labour Loves New Zealand Music' stickers to giggling teenage girls. Didn't see Katherine Rich or that young chap from New Zealand First. Perhaps they were having it large in the Boiler Room.
We caught the D4, who didn't seem quite as firing as last year, before heading over for the MintChicks, who were dressed in full-length plastic gold suits and leapt about manically, as it their wont. A place circled overhead with a banner advertising their new single, 'Fuck the Golden Youth'.
Anyway, Matt and I decided to wait out The Streets in the adjacent open-air bar, so as to be close for Trinity Roots, who, playing their second-last gig ever, poured out a kind of beautiful psychedelic reggae. One of them called his pregnant wife on his mobile phone and got the crowd to shout out hello to her, which was nice.
By now, the strain of a day in the blazing sun was starting to show. Middle-aged couples started muttering to each other about how long they'd be able to stick it, and some of the brainless youths who had turned up without even a hat or sunglasses were starting to look fairly peaky on it. One or two of them looked severely sunburned.
We took another quick rest stop back at the stadium, where Slipknot were still scaring their fans to bits. The Slipknot fans (or "maggots" as they prefer to be called) were amazing: at least two of them got through the heat of the day in tight-fitting leather gimp masks. They were throwing up the goat non-ironically.
Eventually it was time to head back over the way to see Dimmer, who, to a relatively small crowd, hauled out their space-rock festival set, and were, along with Le Tigre, my highlight for the day.
I missed the Beastie Boys (who played a very jolly greatest hits set apparently) entirely, largely as a result of my ill-fated decision to pop in and see if the Chemical Brothers were any good. Carl Cox was still playing (and actually sounding pretty good), and by the time he'd finished, some predictably ominous introductory music had played, and the Chemicals had knocked out 'Hey Boys, Hey Girls' and their new single, 'Galvanise', I had decided that no, I still didn't like them. Too much block-rockin', not enough groove. Time to go.
Problem: if getting in to the Boiler Room had been a squeeze, getting out was nigh impossible. There was a little room in the centre of the tent, but all the exits were rammed with people coming in. I briefly found being crushed up with literally thousands of very-out-of-it people quite unpleasant and just had to stand still and wait for a while.
And so, not being a fan of the John Spencer Blues Explosion, it was pretty much Big Day Over. Verdict? Not as good a lineup as last year, and the hip-hop stage is still a real problem. With Shapeshifter banging away in the tent next door, Tha Feelstyle (read Grant Smithies' excellent profile from yesterday's Star Times) could barely draw a crowd, which was a real shame, because he was great. Ditto for the visiting hip-hop DJs, including Money Mark, although The Fast Crew did demonstrate that the local pop-rap pulls the punters.
There were two ambulance cases as a result of party pill overdoses (Can we please stop calling them "herbal"? Because they aren't) : I guess our binge culture is still with us. Not even the hint of any kind of violence, that I saw. And a remarkably widespread ignorance of how to avoid having one's brain boiled and skin burned when spending hours in the blazing sun.
So Paul and I pulled out into the departing throng, and began the long drive back to our side of town. On the way, we stopped at a wedding reception: that of Big Ross and Amber. I've known Big Ross for a long time, and in the mid-80s, when he was a member of Bird Nest Roys, I used to see a lot of him and the crowd that surrounded the band - a bunch of lovely oddballs who had come out of West Auckland. They always had a powerful sense of family around them - extending even to their own special jargon - and, unsurprisingly, there was plenty of that in the wedding party. People were drunk, happy and emotional.
It was fitting, then, that Ross chose to mark the music that had brought them altogether and defined them for so long. His old friends got up with him and played two sets as Bird Nest Roys, and one as the post-BNR band, The Tufnels. I caught the second BNR set and nearly wept. Older and greyer, but still one with the music they'd made, they filled the room with a joyous noise.
The guests danced manically as they played 'Jaffa Boy', at the conclusion of which Little Ross invited to the stage the "little kid, with orange lips/and chocolate on his mind" about whom the song was written all those years ago. He's 18 now. They also played their covers of the Hollies' 'Bus Stop' and Magazine's 'Shot By Both Sides' (done as straight rock 'n' roll) and finished with Little Ross' song about wooing his own wife, 'Bided My Time'.
When it was over, Big Ross fell off the stage into the arms of his own lovely wife, and then several of his mates just came up and hugged him. (To see what a lovely man Ross is, check out the way he announced the happy news to his friends.) It was loving and special and a testament to the power of music to bring people together. As celebration-through-music it was beautiful and authentic in a way that the day's loved-up dance music and the Polyphonic Spree had not been.
In charge of a car, and too tired anyway, I did not further avail myself of the extremely generous bar, and headed for home. Trundling down an empty Premier Ave, I swerved just in time to avoid killing a hedgehog. Back home, I got a glass of wine and just sat out on the deck for a while, in the quiet. The Milky Way soared across the top of the sky, and the moon peeked over the trees, casting a silvery halo. It was really quite beautiful. It had not, I decided, been too bad a day.
Good Day Mediaphiles ... | Jan 21, 2005 10:22
GOOD DAY MEDIAPHILES … Did you miss me? I missed you … I gave up not going to the Big Day Out years ago. By which I mean, I'd always tell myself that this might be the year I'd give it a miss. But, as surely as … Friday afternoon would find me in Penrose. Now, I just assume I'm going.
And why not? It's the annual meeting of the tribes: long, colourful, busy and noisy as fuck And it's actually better than it used to be. In the first couple of years, the staging arrangements weren't as good, and there was a background danger of encountering drunken idiots. People generally weren't as nice.
But somewhere along the line - I think from about the time that girls stopped schlepping around after their boyfriends and started getting themselves about in girl gangs - it evolved into something better. Last year was a kind of peak of tolerance and good attitude. As a Public Address reader noted, "I've never, ever, been asked at the Big Day Out if I could see the band properly, and had people shift to get me a better view."
I guess it's extra welcome this year as a conscious break from the wowsers and moralists. For a few hours on a sunny day, you can be with tens of thousands of people who probably, to some extent, see the world a bit like you do.
It's brief enough. 2005 is an election year, so brace yourselves for a tide of tosh from about Waitangi Day till November. And we'll now have three 7pm TV current affairs shows to deliver it.
We'll doubtless hear a lot more about the moral backlash; which, like a particularly annoying little dog, is a lot louder than it is large. The Sunday Star Times rather queerly tried to tell us last weekend that "moral and ethical decline" "topped" New Zealanders' concerns in 2004. Actually, it didn't. That was the race debate.
The moral morass didn't even come second, it came sixth: and that only because it spiked to the point where a whole 11% of people told UMR it was our biggest issue, in November, at the height of the whole civil unions hoo-ha. By December, when the bill actually passed, it had fallen to 9% and will, I bet, fall again this month. Race and Treaty issues, on the other hand, peaked at 40% last February. There is simply no comparison between the two.
I actually got hold of the UMR Mood of the Nation review that the Star Times got, and it's quite interesting. Call me what you like, I still think the future of our economy is the biggest issue, even if the punters don't. We've had good economic growth since 2000 - and, more, particularly, a consistent, robust sense of optimism - but the future is hardly guaranteed.
One of the surveys found the highest support ever - 35%, with 19% don't know or don't care - for New Zealand becoming a republic, and a strong demographic skew in the responses, with those over 60 being most likely to oppose that change. This is a reform that will look after itself over time. I suspect we'll have a serious debate about it in about 10 years' time.
Anyway, you will doubtless be electrified to know that Act MP Muriel Newman has established her own website aiming to "declare war on political correctness", which I suppose makes more sense than, say declaring war on Australia. Most of the alleged outrages listed on the site are unexceptional: Newman gets herself in a lather about a $30,000 grant in 2003 to establish a Maori creative industries cluster.
Listen, I met Garry Nicholas, the founder of Maori Arts New Zealand, last year. He took a group of young Maori artists on a trial exhibition trip to North America. They did a million dollars worth of business out of art collectors who prized above all the indigenous identity that Muriel Newman seems to find so offensive.
In the end, "political correctness" is a phrase used by people when they've run out of arguments. I'll always treasure interviewing Murray McCully and listening to him hold forth about the overwhelming wave of political correctness sweeping the country. When he stopped I asked him if he could define "political correctness" for me and the listeners. "No, not really," he declared thunderously, before concluding with a flourish, "not easily."
Dazzling. Well, let me help. While it can lend itself to the excessive or naive, it more often adds up to respect, and not using language to demean people. My two kids are both mildly autistic: am I happy that they are today described as having a disability rather than being "retarded"? Especially when they're both actually perfectly intelligent? Of course I fucking well am -and I actually welcome any argument as to why I shouldn't be.
And respect is what I trust will be practised here today. Take your turn, be cool and generally comport yourself as if the world is your friend. Wise Old Uncle Russ, who went to Glastonbury three times, also advises taking some measure of protection from the sun, and pacing yourself on whatever your poison is.
The report in yesterday's Herald on party-pill overdoses was timely. There are a number of drugs - wine, for example - of which it is cool to occasionally have a little too much. Benzylpiperazine isn't one of them.
I tend to think that the guy who takes a multiple overdose of Charge pills and misses his favourite band because he's having convulsions in the back of an ambulance is the 21st century equivalent of the guy who misses his favourite band because he's vomiting through his nose after necking half a bottle of bourbon before the gates open. Although there are probably still some of those. Anyway, don't be the sad guy. Or girl.
Me, I'm planning to get back along by about 2pm, in time for the Phoenix Foundation. Much as I would enjoy seeing SJD, the Fanatics, the Checks, the Donnas, Pluto, tha Feelstyle and Deja Voodoo, I think nine hours on the go is probably enough for me. Although I have, it must be said, been able to arrange myself some comforts. Somehow, I find myself with a corporate car park this year. Truly, I am owning the place.
Possible highlights, then? Well, Flaming Lips blindsided me with one of the best gigs I've ever seen last year, so who knows? But seeing as you're asking, RJD2, Kid 606, the D4, Mint Chicks, Dimmer, Shihad, Le Tigre and Trinity Roots' second-last gig ever. With the Streets as a possible long-odds surprise crackers, and jury out on the Chemicals and the Beasties.
It's plenty to be going on with. And I must be going myself. So keep it locked on the b on your way in and out, and I'll see you in the mosh pit. Not. G'bye!
The above is the script of a radio commentary delivered today on 95bFM, live from Ericsson Stadium, venue for the Big Day Out, just for old times' sake.
PS: Whilst there's no denying George W. Bush's ability to win the only polls that really matter, just about every other poll stinks for him in Inuguration week. According to the latest Pew survey, he kicks off with the worst approval ratings of any second-term president in 50 years. Meanwhile, in a poll commissioned by the BBC World Service, a majority of 22,000 people surveyed across 21 countries believe that Bush will have "a negative impact on peace and security" compared with only 26% who think he is a positive force for good. Two out of three Britons had a negative view of America's influence on the world, and the same proportion opposed sending any more British troops to Iraq. Trade considerations appear to behind a relatively positive view of Bush in India, one of only three countries where a majority believed that the world was better off with Bush in charge. The Washington Post's polling finds a majority disapproving of his Social Security reforms. He seems to have a lock on the terrorism issue, however. Lots more WP polls here.
Geeky stuff | Jan 20, 2005 11:23
Adherents to the Cult of Mac who have visited the fine websites operated by Scoop, The Listener, Street Talk, Rialto and Stuff in the past two or three days may have noticed some odd behaviour. Specifically, Safari and Opera browsers will try - and fail , but keep trying - to download a file called "acvcbd.aspx", and will attempt a new download for every page you load.
It's not a show-stopper, but it's very irritating, as correspondents to the boards at Street Talk and IDGNet's Press F1 section have attested.
So what is it? Duff code from MediaOne, the Canadian-based online advertising company that has chosen New Zealand to beta-test its technology.
What MediaOne is meant to do is spawn an unsolicited pop-up window (or "player") containing a video ad. This is what it was doing to users of Internet Explorer 6.1 for Windows and up, until this week. But an expansion of the project, to deliver to all Windows browsers, appears to have been defective. (I have another report of it triggering multiple reloads in Windows on The Listener site.)
The .aspx extension is standard for pages created with Microsft .NET, but the problem doesn't occur with the vaster majority of other .NET sites, including Microsoft's own (although it's been an issue for ages at Al Jazeera).
IDGNet has removed the code from its forums and at least a couple of the others have been in touch with the company.
Greig Buckley, MediaOne's vice president and general manager for New Zealand told Scoop that "in the default installation of Safari it apparently doesn't recognise .aspx files as legitimate HTML. Users have to instruct (teach) the browser to accept it when asked the first time it is encountered, then it will no longer prompt each time an .aspx file loads. I guess this is partly a result of the standoff between Microsoft and Apple, as their new browser starts to take over from IE for Mac (and as Firefox grows, but the ASPX format won't be an issue for that) …
"We are running some tests to see if there is any solution to eliminate this issue. I will keep you posted over the next few days. In the meantime I suggest you advise users to take the above action when they first encounter an .aspx file on the net."
He suggests that an update to Safari in the last couple of days has caused the problem. Hardly. VersionTracker says the current version of Safari is nearly a year old. The problem is actually this: the MIME type isn't set on the aspx file.
Safari certainly doesn't have to be trained (for instance, it didn't have to be trained to accept the .sm file extension used on Public Address) and it doesn't actually have a preference to do so. (By the way, the file has no content: its only purpose is to set a cookie in the browser.)
Given that MediaOne has required all these sites to allow it to place its own Javascript code on their pages - and leaving aside, for the moment, the merits of unsolicited video pop-ups (does anybody respond positively to them?) - this seems pretty sloppy.
I've got as much interest in the maturing of the Internet advertising market as anyone, and I have my own ideas about what works. I made a no-pop-ups promise when we first launched advertising on Public Address, and I would hope to stick to it. We do occasionally get reader comments or complaints about the ads we do run, and in one case, I passed those on to the corporate advertiser, who toned down the ad and, I think, achieved a better result all around. MediaOne needs to stop blaming browsers and test its code properly before it posts it on other people's websites. (It might also be an idea to enable the "feedback" button in the MediaOne player.)
Moving on, it's actually about time an established news organisation did this: Salon is running a story by Peter Dizikes headed The scandal sheet, which collates "34 scandals from the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency - every one of them worse than Whitewater."
Don't expect the conservative blogosphere to break from calling for Kofi Annan's head long enough to mention the oddities of Halliburton's business in Iraq, still less to contemplate the multiple instances of flat-out crookery offered up by the Republican House leader Tom DeLay (memorably described in Lewis Lapham's editorial in this month's issue of Harper's magazine as "always quick to quote from scripture but quicker still to give or take a bribe"), but do feel free to read Dizikes' story and weep.
Faintly hilarious example of neocon tunnel vision: Having railed against the result of the governor's election in Washington state (taken by the Democrat after - quelle horreur! - a recount) Power Line is now demanding a Pulitzer Prize for a Seattle Times columnist who is unhappy that there were 2500-3000 more votes cast than there were registered voters. Oddly enough, the same righteous anger was not directed toward the state of Ohio (won, of course by the Bush campaign), where in Cleveland alone, there were 93,000 more votes than registered voters. Indeed, Washington state was an anomaly in this respect: almost everywhere else, the dubious results ran against the Democrats. Of course, anyone who complains about those results is a poor-loser looney liberal.
Further, even in Washington state, there were other oddities. American statistician Arlene Ash, in a new piece called Why We Must Question Our Elections, pointed out that:
Snohomish County, Washington, also used non-verifiable touch screen voting in all precincts (polling locations) on election day 2004. Among about 100,000 touch screen votes in the famously close governor's race, Republican candidate Rossi had an 8,000 vote advantage; while among about 200,000 paper (absentee) ballots, Democrat Gregoire had 2,000 more votes. [2] Some voters spoke of the touch screen machine changing their vote. Countywide, there were 19 formally reported instances of machine switching; every one favored the Republican.
The kindest conclusion is that the system is in disarray and urgently in need of inspection and reform.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration appears to be taking much the same approach to its "reform" of Social Security (ie: superannuation) as it did in the run-up to war in Iraq: declare a crisis and then lie vigorously. Check out this analysis from the economics correspondent at MSNBC:
"If you're 20 years old, in your mid-20s, and you're beginning to work, I want you to think about a Social Security system that will be flat bust, bankrupt, unless the United States Congress has got the willingness to act now," he said Tuesday at a forum on Social Security. The stark choice of words was hardly a slip of the tongue - Bush used the word "bankrupt" five times in the 45-minute session.
He also warned of a potentially "bankrupt" system in a radio address last month, referring to demographic changes that signal a "looming danger."
"In the year 2018, for the first time ever, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than the government collects in payroll taxes," Bush said.
That is just plain wrong. In 14 of the past 47 years, including 1975 to 1983, Social Security paid out more in benefits than the government collected in payroll, with the gap reaching $10 billion in 1983. So the projected "crossover" point in 2018 is a relatively meaningless milestone, say opponents of Bush's privatization plans, even as they acknowledge the system faces long-term problems.
Bush's statements "appear designed to further a widespread perception, especially among younger people, that Social Security will entirely collapse and that there will be nothing for them when they retire," said Bob Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The White House press office did not return phone calls seeking an explanation.
Well, time is marching on and I've got a little work to do: including knocking out a special old-school Hard News bulletin for 95bFM's broadcast from the Big Day Out site tomorrow (which I might post here too). So, yes, at about 8.45am tomorrow, the words "GOOD DAY MEDIAPHILES …" will be heard again …
PS: As of about an hour after this post, the MediaOne problem is no longer occuring on the above sites. It looks like they've added a MIME type and an empty HTML document in that time. Happy to be of service ...
Back from the Rock | Jan 17, 2005 10:36
It's one of the curiousities of living in Auckland Central that it's possible to take a get-away-from-it-all family holiday in your own electorate. So, secure in the knowledge that Judith Tizard would still be our MP, we headed for Waiheke Island.
Ironically, the furthest we got from home, philosophically speaking, was the suburbs of southeast Auckland, through which it is necessary to pass to reach the Waiheke car ferry at Half Moon Bay. I exaggerate only a little when I say that I get panicky in Howick. It's Auckland, Jim, but not as we know it …
But we reached the island at the same time as the fine weather did, and consequently had a great time. I can see why people choose to live there. And, by dint of knowing two or three people on "the rock", I got to know several more, including some Italians, both resident and visiting, at a most enjoyable barbecue. (Memo to self: as well-founded as it might be in fact, "But your Prime Minister's a crook, isn't he?" is perhaps not the best way to open a conversation with a visiting Italian, even after everyone has had a few.)
The Saturday market in Ostend was a highlight: it's not large, but it was very busy and quite the best market experience I've had in a while. There was no art to speak of, but some good market jewellery. Books were plentiful, and cheap: I picked up Michael Fowler's coffee-table book The New Zealand House for $4 (lovely pictures, captions in desperate need of an editor) and Upgrading New Zealand's Competitive Advantage (1992) by Michael Porter et al. It might come in handy.
The role that Waiheke's immigrant population plays was evident at the market: there were Italians (so many Italians!) with their breads, a Chinese man quietly selling brilliant spring rolls, and Poms hawking any old thing. I spent $110 and went home happy.
The house we hired from friends-of-friends came with quite a trove of holiday reading. After flicking through a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters, I settled on John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), which I gather is required reading for people in my line.
I'm still ploughing through it, and still waiting for the author to actually define the "common sense" he proposes as a sort of Holy Grail (I skipped forward to its last mention in the index - still no real help). If reason is capable of being tasked to dark ends, then "common sense", an idea that ships with its own built-in justification, would seem doubly so. Ask Dubya.
Saul's declaration that "never have so few people been willing to speak out on important questions" is questionable, his suspicion of science is wearisome and his way of sweeping over detail seems to reflect the kind of bullying argument against which he spends 500-odd pages railing. Still, he emphatically lives up to his argument for clarity of language - his prose is highly lucid - so I'll press on.
Saul's proclamation, on "the invention of the secret", that "until recently, very little was considered improper to know" would surprise, say, the 19th century British Parliamentarians who considered it deeply improper that the public should know of their deliberations by means of news reporting. That story is told in Andrew Marr's My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, which I review in next week's Listener and heartily recommend.
Meanwhile, back on the block, the Sunday Star Times contrives an entirely new definition of "top" (meaning "bottom"), with a news section story headed Morals, ethics top New Zealanders' list of concerns. It refers to an interesting set of feature stories around UMR Research's 2005 Mood of the Nation survey, including one noting that we're notably happy about the state of the nation, and another that "moral/ethical decline" ranked sixth of the top six issues noted by New Zealanders in 2004, at 5%, behind race relations and the Treaty (28%), health (11%), economy (8%), crime/violence (6%) and education (6%). The figures are an average for the past year, and ethical decline apparently peaked in November, during the civil unions hoo-ha, at 11%. So the news story might actually have been more accurately headed "concern over moral decline begins to ebb". Honestly, sometimes you'd think that the SST actually really wants a moral backlash …
The Herald also sought to take the moral temperature with a survey which indicated that two thirds of New Zealanders believed in some sort of God, but only one in five regularly attended church. Just over 60% said they believed in an afterlife, but it would have been useful for subjects to have been further probed as to exactly what their faith encompassed. Are we anything like the US, where a new Gallup poll found that "almost half of Americans (45%) believe that human beings "were created by God essentially as they are today (that is, without evolving) about 10,000 years ago"? Or is ours a more practical faith?
Well-known lefty rag the Financial Times claims that Colin Powell was told to step down after giving the wrong answer to his President ("we're losing") when asked how Iraq was going.
In the local blogosphere, Dog Biting Men's MediaCow (so many quadrapeds!) declares 2005 The Year of Going Too Far, and Ben Thomas does a devastating fact-check on Rodney Hide's latest scandal.
No Right Turn pondered Don Brash's sudden conversion to the idea of referenda (do you think there are any other policies National can swipe from New Zealand First?) and Tim Barnett's depiction of Brash's new line as "desperate".
And I do like the cut of the new group blog Three Point Turn, one of whose founders has been obliged to explain that he's not that Nick Eynon.
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