Public Address - Island Life (Home)

The Meat Raffle | Aug 24, 2004 17:24

I'm pretty sure the first thing I ever won in a raffle was a frozen chook. It was at the Rangiwahia Sports Day, where the Lions club would do instant raffles in between the running races, show jumping, chopping contests and ram riding. If you've never been to a country sports day, you should poke, as Mr Steve Braunias might say, your snoot into one some time. If you like summer afternoons, fresh air, friendly people with a dry sense of humour, car boot picnics under trees - and beer - you should get along to one as soon as you can and fill your boots. That's assuming these things are still running. I've been out of the countryside a long while now.

Anyway, about that chook - if indeed it was a chook. Whatever I actually won, I remember being impressed by the ease of the whole procedure. You went up to the man selling the tickets, got yourself one, and waited for the wheel to spin. When it stopped at your number and it dawned on you that you had won an honest-to-goodness prize, you were not only chuffed, you were also persuaded that these contests were worth a go. To this day, if someone offers me a ticket, I buy one. Mostly I do it for altruistic reasons. I know the odds. All the same, a little corner of my mind reminds me that I might also be in with a shot. In this way I have acquired booze, confectionary, a disposable camera, a complete boxed set of Beatles albums and the odd meat raffle.

Formal gambling I put in another category. I like (or at least I did until I got tired of the time it involved) punting on the horses. If friends haul me into a casino I like blackjack, although for the most part I think that Sky City is a joyless spectacle that you really don't want to visit sober. Can't be bothered with Lotto though. I only enjoy serious gambling when I fancy I can beat the odds.

As for the chooks and the meat raffles and the LPs, well, one guy's pleasant surprise is another sardonic writer's prizeless confirmation that it is a rum world.

I was reading Page 94 of the Listener the other day and realised with mounting anxiety that I've actually been winning more than my share of raffles, and that I have probably acquired at least a prize or two that should properly have gone to that column's writer.

If the piece in question were available online, there'd be a link here. I'm guessing that either the Listener has decided that it's too metaphysically paradoxical to have a Page 94 in cyberspace, or that it's a bit dumb to give away your best page for nix. So if you haven't already seen "Your Lucky Day", pad over to your LazyBoy and pick up the Olympics issue with Steven Ferguson on the cover and flick to the back. There you'll find the whole poignant story. We live in an age of easy steaks: I desperately want to win a meat raffle before I die , he writes.

I have spent my life in bars eyeing up the raffled meat pack, imagining all that free lunch, dinner and breakfast, scorch and smoke on the barbecue - then throwing in my $2, studiously choosing the right number in the ticket block and never, ever, winning so much as a sausage.

I am nothing if not a campaigner for the downtrodden and neglected. Steve Braunias is today's cause. I have had the opportunity in my life to buy him one beer, but I think the scales of justice still need a bit more butcher's finger on them.

So I have whipped up something for us all to do our bit, and when I say "us" I'm working on the not unreasonable assumption that there is a good clutch of Public Address readers who get a copy of the Listener in their paws now and then. If you're a fan of Page 94, then you'll know exactly what this symbolises.

(Update Sept 5: The image has been retired - there's an explanation below)

Looks good on the page, doesn't it? It's not a great likeness - Russell's one is a good deal more accurate - and yet somehow it works.

Well the good news is: you can wear that very image on the clothing item of your choice. Or a mousepad. Or a clock. Or a beer stein. Or a frisbee. Or a tote bag.

All you have to do is click here to the newly minted Page 94 shop at cafepress.com and pick out the item of your choice. Don't be shy - buy up large! If enough of us buy something, there'll be a nice little cheque in Steve's mailbox at the end of each month. He will have won the meat raffle, and it will have happened in the best way possible: completely out of the blue. Of course it would be nice if he could remain oblivious of all this until the cheque arrives, so, you know, let's not get it mentioned on the Internet or anything.

Perhaps he'll get wind of it anyway, but on the other hand, if he's busy hoofing around Lower Hutt and up to out-of-the-way places like Feilding for the next few weeks, perhaps we can preserve the element of surprise.

Don't forget - it's Father's Day very soon. What better gift for Dad than a picture of an assured aviator confident in his masculinity? You only have to look at the way this guy wears his goggles to tell that he doesn't need John Tamihere to tell him where to find a place that serves a decent sausage roll and a pot of strong tea. This is the kind of thing that fathers everywhere could be wearing this September. But get in quick. Stocks are strictly limited to however many we can shift.

All kidding aside, this is on the up and up - all profits will arrive unheralded in Steve's letter box. I think it would be a nice surprise to spring on him and, if you're a fan, I suspect you will too.

Update Sep 5

Not all good ideas work out quite as happily as you might hope. The image for this promotion came from the Listener, and they conveyed the message that perhaps one should not be using their intellectual property. Fair enough, and my apologies to APN. To those of you who ordered an item, and contributed to the mailbox surprise, thanks for the thought. The shop is now closed.

Digg this Scoopit!

Duck! It's A Pig! | Aug 20, 2004 16:40

This last week or so, instead of: producing a fresh column; pulling together my notes for a conference; working up an outline for the fine people at Penguin; re-working a piece for a foreign publication and writing a speech for a client, I worked on overcoming a substantial disinclination to do any writing. Glad that's passed.

I was aided in this by the diversions of a new PC and a subscription to the Microsoft Empower program (and many thanks to Chris McKay for alerting me to that.) A fresh PC generally brings about a file spring cleaning exercise for me. This can be quite time-consuming. Over time, my hard disk gradually becomes littered with fragments of ideas and projects only partially-completed (or to be more honest, barely-begun.) Speeches.com has a lot of undeveloped potential, in my humble opinion. I just have to get around to implementing even a few of the partially-developed ideas.

Why do I have all this half-done work? Refer to the bit in previous blogs where I talk about having the bad habit of never saying "no" to anyone. Of course, sensible people hire other people to help them, but I just don't fancy it as far as the site's concerned; I find it easier to do it myself than try to explain to other people what's required.

Anyway, the matter of sorting and categorising all this material usually gets my fullest attention when I set up a new PC, and as soon as I open a document to recall what it's all about, I'm distracted. Before you know it, hundreds of germs of ideas are mutating wildly.

Just to add to the skiving off, I took advantage of the MSDN access that comes with the Empower Program to download a copy of Visual Studio.Net. New toy. Endlessly diverted.

But it's a dull blog if your copy keeps going stale, so let's pick up where I left off last time with the grand plan for the Devonport waterfront, flogging off the Navy land, putting up apartments and installing an underwater travelator to Queen Street.

Tim Harding was intrigued by the technical challenge.

I can't help but wonder how fast you could make a travelator that long. Obviously you'd need several abutting travelators of graduating speeds to keep the acceleration from breaking people. The same in reverse at the other end... could you create an artificial tail wind to help negate the air resistance? Man... I wish I had a slice of that $4B budget to find out.

It turns out this very question is already being tackled elsewhere. In France - where they call it a trottoir - they have one at a station interchange inside the Paris metro. It's 180 metres long and gets up to 11 km per hour. Hell, that's nothing. We're bungy jumpers here. I'd say we're good for hanging on at thirty k, no worries.

If you click here, you can read all about it - animated guide and everything. You can travel from Le Mans to Paris in 50 minutes, the project manager for the Paris metro points out, but crossing Montparnasse Station may take you 20 minutes.

The real problem nowadays is how to move crowds; they can travel fast over long distances with the TGV (high-speed train) or airplanes, but not over short distances (under 1km), he says.

Bart Janssen, whose abiding interest in the natural world is clearly evident in his contribution to the discussion, has this excellent suggestion:

Maybe you should get Kelly Tarton in on the action and make the tunnel perspex - you'd probably want to clean up the scum that is our harbour and you'd need some clever robot thingy (technical term that) to keep it clean, but wouldn't it be cool to have the harbour as a sightseeing attraction?

Of course you'd want to make the harbour a marine reserve to get the fish back but seriously how many people do you know who are silly enough to eat fish caught in the inner harbour? Splendid idea all round really.

Couldn't agree more, Bart. I had a bit to do with those folks when they were putting in their Antarctic attraction, as it happens, and they struck me as the kind of people who were game for just about any kind of imaginative tourist lurk, so why not? You might even hook the travelator up to Orakei wharf.

Of course in my rush of blood to the head I overlooked one slight problem, which Jock Laing helpfully pointed out.

David, those apartments with great views would face South. To be pleasant to live in they need Northern exposure to get some sun. In winter the lack of sun would be very uncomfortable.

True. Mind you, there are quite a few houses along that stretch already which must have to cope with the problem to some extent. Maybe you could set the buildings far enough off the cliff to catch some light from the north, and end up with fewer apartments. Anyone have some thoughts on that?

Actually, if we're going to think outside the box, as they say, why not get really inventive about the design of the apartments as well? We could take our lead from the ideas being explored at the Dilbert House, where Dilbert creator Scott Adams enlists fans, online architects and experts to build an energy-efficient, eco-friendly and functional home for the modern dweller. Not unsurprisingly, they have ideas that would suit a certain type of apartment inhabitant:

Drive-up window for the pizza delivery boy, FedEx, etc.

Combination refrigerator and compostor. Just leave the food you don't want in there.

A giant kitchen sink for informal meals where everyone just leans over the sink.

Drains in the floor so you just hose everything down.

You also get the truly inventive touches such as:

Dilbert might be sick of the noise his neighbors make. He might record it and then play it back through loudspeakers directed at the source of the original racket, with a slight delay, amplified. It would be fun to see how long it would take them to recognize their own arguments, crying baby, yowling cat or squawking bird.

But there are some altogether more interesting notions in there as well, such as exercise equipment connected to generators for selling energy back to the grid. But don't take my word for it, visit the site and be amazed.

Meanwhile back in real estate world, Chris McKay - in the spirit familiar to all of us living in Devonport - endorsed the more material aspects of the concept.

I'm keen for the property value surge from the 10 min walk from downtown Auckland sales pitch.

And this is where it gets hopeful, readers, because he says he's forwarded a copy of the blog to his father in law.

So you never know. Pigs might never fly, but is it too much to hope that we might one day have our own trottoir?

Digg this Scoopit!

I Want John Banks To Be My Mayor | Aug 04, 2004 17:23

Don't click back. You haven't arrived at Aaron Bhatnagar's blog by mistake. The headline is genuine, but not for the reason you might imagine.

If you live at the Devonport end of the North Shore, there's a good likelihood you spend more time in downtown Auckland than you do in any of the suburbs north of here. Our nearest courthouse is in Albert Street, which beats the next closest one - in Albany - by some distance. Thousands of us spend most of our working day on the far side of the bridge, and we're as likely to be eating, drinking or watching music or movies over there as we are doing something over here on any given night.

The administrative functions of North Shore City Council seem to be drifting northwards, away from us, and the new geographical centre of the North Shore seems to be drifting with it. This is all splendid news for the growth of North Shore City, but at a certain point, it seems only fair to ask whether we down here at the abandoned end should still be a part of it.

Our local paper made the good point a couple of weeks ago that it might be time to reconsider the city boundaries. So how about it, Mayor Wood? Goodbye Devonport, helloooo Silverdale?

The paper got a couple of eager letters in favour, and I've been trying out the idea on a few of the neighbours. There seems to be a good bit of enthusiasm for it. I haven't actually struck anyone saying That city with the mayor who wants a four billion dollar motorway - I want in on that, but I have struck a few people grumbling that apart from a costly rescue of our decrepit sewer and drainage system, there doesn't seem to have been any very significant spending of our rates dollars down here.

Whether we'd get any better deal from an Auckland Council is hard to say, of course. Perhaps we could put the entire thing up for tender. We're already being managed by remote for the most part - why not go the whole hog? Tim Shadbolt might see us as a handy boost to his rating base.

Okay, that's getting a bit far-fetched, I'll admit. But while I'm tossing far-fetched ideas around, I might as well mention another one I've nursed for years, because if you could actually make it work, it could be quite a nice dowry to offer the ACC.

If you've ever taken the ferry over to Devonport, you'll have noticed that a good chunk of the shoreline facing the city is occupied by the Navy. Any aftershave-coated real estate agent could line up a buyer for that land before you could say new Audi. And in point of fact we're talking fleets of Audis for that particular stretch of property. It's a BIG chunk of land and the views are all harbour.

Given that we live in a remarkably benign geopolitical climate, we theoretically don't need a Navy, of course, but giving due deference to realpolitik, I'd suggest the smart option would be to hang on to it.

But does it actually need to be in Auckland? Why not put it some place else where the land is less expensive? This very suggestion came up just a few years ago. Picton loved the idea, and so did Whangarei. The navy could see some benefits too - a good chunk of their personnel are finding the rising cost of housing in Auckland a real problem. The idea of moving to, say, Whangarei looked not all bad. Studies were duly done, but unfortunately the decision in the end was: stay put.

I reckon it's worth another look. Mate, you want to see what they're paying for land around here. What follows here is an entirely uncosted proposal by someone who is neither a developer nor an engineer, and who has no intention of risking even a single one of his hard-earned American dollars on any opportunity to participate in any such venture.

Should you proceed with this most excellent idea, you will be doing so on the basis that you acknowledge that in respect of these plans, I scarcely know what I'm talking about. Should you actually be an engineer or developer, please by all means let me know if this is as you might say, a runner.

Enough with the preamble. Here's the idea.

One. The Navy flogs the land (including dockyard) and uses the proceeds to move to a new home at some other accommodating port.

Two. Developer whacks up apartments along the entire site, said apartments to be limited in height to the cliff line behind them, thereby leaving views from - and of - existing heritage homes unmolested.

Three. Developer flogs off these apartments with marvellous views to punters at usual egregious margin.

And why will punters pay through the nose for them? Because it shall be a condition of the resource consent that said developer shall construct a connecting under-harbour tunnel to the bottom of Queen Street, containing a walkway, with one of those travelator things you get in the big international airports.

Okay, these things aren't cheap, but just think how much you'll be able to charge for the apartments, Sparky. Harbour views, a short stroll to Queen Street in all weathers, none of the noise you get in the central city, and a location that can never be built out, even with Auckland City's daft building laws.

And this is a dowry for Auckland City why? Because effectively you're sticking - who knows - maybe a few thousand extra rate-paying residents in the middle of the city at no significant additional load on the transport system. They'll be doing their commuting on the travelator, as will a shitload of people in the Devonport and surrounding area, I can confidently promise you.

This will, of course, create parking and traffic issues and Fullers Ferries would hardly be likely to thrill to the idea. But these are - as Dustin Hoffman said so correctly in Wag the Dog, mere details. Cut Fullers in on the action, make some more parking spaces - no sweat. And even if it might sound a bit out there, just remember, you've also heard this year about a 4 billion dollar motorway that probably won't be able to pay for itself, and a V8 race in a city that's plagued by traffic arterial sclerosis.

If I were Candidate Banks, I'd be in like a robber's dog.

Digg this Scoopit!