Public Address - Island Life (Home)

Another Man's Poisson | Aug 24, 2006 15:20

We were talking, my wife and I, over lunch yesterday about the words Helen Clark had chosen to convey her distaste for the Auditor General's recent forthrightness. We agreed that even a phrase as innocuous as "I was rather surprised by that", could be a bit of a scrotum-shrinker when issued by this particular Prime Minister. If she's not mightily pissed off, I'd be very surprised. However I'd also be surprised if this Auditor General felt particularly cowed.

Cojones. When we need a word to describe boldness in business we have France's entrepreneur. But when we want to speak of someone with courage in the face of imminent and palpable risk, we turn to the nation of bullfighters.

This morning, here at the world headquarters of speechesdotcom, I opened my email to a dispiriting message.

David,

Your server has failed the RAID container, we are working to bring it back
now. I'll contact you as soon as I have more information.

Thanks,

Matt

Maximumasp.com

Regular readers will grasp how perturbing this news was to me.

Mercifully, this time, the disruption was kept to a minimum, and as I write the site is humming along as it ought. But once more, the entrepreneur was reminded of the need for sturdy cojones. No matter how hard you try to eliminate the risks, you will still be in for some difficult moments.

People who have made a big fat success of their business can be quite forthcoming about hurdles they have overcome. I know of one person who has a worldwide recruitment business who likes to recall the lonely day he sat alone in his empty office contemplating the ledger of outgoings (substantial) and income (nil). The phone rang. So despondent was he that he resolved that it would be the last one; he'd shut up shop. The caller was some colossal organisation with a brief for dozens of placements. He was in business.

I also knew a woman with a flourishing PR practice. She told stories of the first fruitless pitches to clients. After one especially promising one, the polite demurral was too much for her. She walked out of the office, into the stairwell, slumped onto a step, dropped the glossy folders, buried her head in her hands and sobbed. But in the best tradition of inspirational tales, she pressed on. She dried her tears, dusted herself off and went back to her office. She kept working the phones and making the pitches and slowly but surely began to pick up the contracts. Plenty would happily settle for a small share of the money she's made since then.

The purpose of these little Of-Course-You-Can-Do-It reminiscences is to preface a little bit of a plug. Wellingtonista readers will be familiar with Martha, and her brand new contribution to the world of online commerce, babylicous.co.nz. Perfect for the little kids in your life. Sick of the same old Pumpkin Patch stuff? Want a cute designer T-shirt for your kids at a very affordable price? These garments should be in your child's wardrobe.

Our glamorous house model, Mary-Margaret, will now show you the very nice Elvis T-shirt Martha kindly made for her. She loves it. Your kids will love theirs.

Do by all means click on over to Babylicious and support local enterprise. And thanks for the T-Shirt, Martha. Back-scratching makes the blogosphere go around. Awakino's Lineman for the County was on the wire just hours after I'd posted my little paean to the well maintained roads of Taranaki - and, of course, the noble whitebait - offering me a pound of Mokau's finest. A pound! She said Ernie I'll be 'appy if it comes up to me chest.

Read that and weep, Long-Suffering Ratepayer of Sandringham. I accept there may be some who tremble at the sight of a tiny whitebait eyeball, but around here where the cojones are abundant, we stare right back as we scoff them.

And I am not alone.

Su Askwith:

Growing up in New Plymouth they have always been part of my life and each new season eagerly awaited. Whilst I too cannot go past a fritter in Mokau, I really did think I was in heaven a few years ago when I went to a meeting in Greymouth and on arrival there was a barbeque. There were buckets of whitebait being made into fritters and cooked straight away.I barely moved from the bbq spot until all were eaten!

Roy Billing reported saliva "all over" his keyboard.

The All Blacks are still winning...and the whitebait are still running. Time to come home methinks.
I picture a Saturday night in Godzone in front of the tv watching the All Blacks win yet another Bledisloe Cup, with no Wallaby supporters in hearing distance, a bottle of Marlborough Sauvugnon Blanc opened, alongside a plate of fresh, New Zealand whitebait fritters... The saliva is drooling again! Why the hell am I living in Australia???!!!

Ian Orchard:

Perhaps Graham Reid was cursed with only ever having tasted frozen whitebait, a pale imitation of the fresh delights. Sadly, it's all we Kiwis can hope for these days.
Oh for the days when my Dad would return from The Coast bearing a quart preserving jar of fresh 'bait. Sold for around 2 bob a container.

David Haywood enthused too, but that was more to do with the allure of librarians.

Everyone has their own fantasy, and I can appreciate that lying under canvas with a sultry librarian, feeding one another whitebait fritters and listening to Peaceful Easy Feeling on the Classic Hits station would not be Graham's idea of A Good Time.

Aspects of that tableau don't really work for me either, but it remains vastly preferable to waking up to an email that shrinks the cojones.

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Extremely Small and Incredibly Nice | Aug 21, 2006 19:12

I expect you will find when you sit down for your first dinner in Heaven that whitebait fritters are what God favours for an entrée*. I yield to no man in admiring the taste and discernment of Graham Reid, but I cannot let his casual dismissal of our national treat go unchallenged:

(nope, I still don't get it. It's a just a slightly fishy omelette. Right?)

Yes, and Townes van Zandt just wrote country rhymes with a croaky voice. I don't believe I could come within 100 miles of Mokau without driving the remaining distance to get one of their whitebait fritters. The last time I was there, you could choose from three tearooms. They all proudly declared their whitebait fritter to be the specialty of the house. Special alright. Vast, they are. I have seen space saver wheels on Japanese imports that wouldn't be as large.

Not that quantity is the only thing that matters. If it did, the sorry stodge they slop onto all-too-accommodating plates at the Lone Star "restaurants" would win awards. But a whitebait fritter in Mokau, huge though it might be, is also a delicate and beautiful thing. So fresh do they taste, you know that it can have been scarcely minutes ago that some sturdy Taranaki grandmother was emptying her nets into the bucket and trundling down to the café in her dusty old Bongo van.

You can stand by your car, look out over the cold blue water and take great gulps of the wind that never stops rolling in off the Tasman Sea, or you can go inside, tuck in your napkin, cut yourself a wedge of your whitebait wheel and close your eyes as you bring the fork to your mouth. Whichever way you go about it, your taste buds will be gently teased by the taste of the sea. Don't forget the lemon wedge.

Your whitebait is a subtle understated thing, a sorbet of sorts. I like an anchovy too, but that's all slapper; a meretricious shocker of a bar-crawler. Whitebait is demure Natasha in the corner, conservative skirt and spectacles and library books. Or so you think until she murmurs something to you in a low smoky voice as she passes. The appeal of the whitebait is all in the fleeting sense of the thing, and that will stay with you long, long after the meal is paid for, and you're once more rolling down the impeccably maintained roads of rural Taranaki.

The memory may still be with you after you have crossed several time zones and at least two language barriers. Buy yourself a copy of the Ukraine Observer, and discover that one of our missing million, Mark Wright, declares Ukraine to be "opportunity, opportunity, opportunity." While pursuing the business of his research and marketing firm keeps him busy, the story tells us,

Wright does acknowledge missing a few things about New Zealand, including his children, the All Blacks rugby team and a local delicacy called Whitebait fritters, made from a minute, thread-like transparent fish.

In that order, one hopes. Footy, then fish, then the kids doesn't sound all that good.

Ukraine is a very long way from hearth, home and little ones. One of the Dads in our neighborhood is currently working in Guam for months at a time, and of course this is a navy suburb, so we see parents sail away in Te Mana for half a year or more. So much to be homesick for, including the kids, the chocolate fish and the marmite sandwiches; but so many culinary adventures, too. The world stretches a long way past the golden arches.

I remember only the good: Po'Boys in the Napoleon House in New Orleans; salt and pepper prawns on Lantau Island; a huge plate of pig suffering in Prague. I suspect Juha, on the other hand, will never entirely slough off his cloak of Finnish despondency and pessimism. Last week he devoted a small corner of his blog to a catalogue of culinary calamities.

Japanese curry. Some war crimes are allowed to continue until this day.

Australian pasta/New Zealand "fresh pasta". Dried wallpaper glue for that Mediterranean zing in your kitchen.

Click on over. His photo of wasabi mayonnaise must be seen to be believed

Yesterday morning the poor man, who lives a couple of houses down from me, emailed in anguish about the Sunday morning choir of power tools. The complete and utter lack of consideration is a shock that will never lose its high voltage for Juha. I was on the other side of the bridge at the time, doing God's work bagging Telecom on the wireless, so I could offer him no solidarity. By the time I was back home, there was still some weed whacking going on just under his window. I can understand his distress, but all I can ever offer him is a Soprano shrug of the shoulders. Whaddayagonnado?

Perhaps next time it happens I'll invite him over and break out the whitebait.

* For the main, I'm thinking crayfish or duck. It will largely depend on how much lime is in the Margaritas.

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However Philip will just sign the card | Aug 15, 2006 16:32

How long is it since you last put your hand in your pocket for a whip around? Would you rate yourself as the generous type? Was it notes or coins? I just pose the question to add a slight cautionary tone before we plunge on to judge others, and poke in our nose where it has not been invited.

Consider a couple of memorable moments in recent New Zealand history. In the early nineties, the Lower Hutt law firm of Renshaw Edwards came undone in the most spectacular fashion when the eponymous partners contrived to steal as much as $20 million of their clients' money, which they poured into those two great New Zealand sinkholes: property speculation and gambling.

Hilariously - I use that term with a little hesitation, because the consequences for numerous innocent people were quite appalling; but I use it all the same because it was hard not to laugh at the sheer black comedy of the thing – each of them was busily siphoning out the funds, one race meeting at a time, entirely unaware that the other was filling his boots with the same catastrophic disregard for the consequences. Which were, of course: bankruptcy, deep and sustained public odium, despair and incarceration.

When these accidents happen, the Law Society is there, of course, with its fidelity fund to put things right, because it's the putting right that counts, isn't it customers? Oh yes it is.

But when she got there, the cupboard was bare. Even though the partners of the country's many law firms large and small had been diligently paying their dues and sustaining a handsome fund to reimburse any poor soul who might wander into a lawyer's office and have his bank account set upon in a manner not condoned by the rules of the society, this one had broken the bank. The depredations of Messrs Edwards and Renshaw had been just too much to bear.

Something had to be done, and the Law Society did the only thing they could: they had a whip around. Cost per head: $8,000 from memory. (If I were MSM, I'd be obliged to look it up, but this being a blog, I'm sure someone will be happy to provide the necessary information or, as they say in the newsroom, do the work for me.)

Lawyers being such uniformly kind and generous types, this all proceeded so smoothly and with so little demur or rancour that people hardly noticed it taking place. As if. There was all kind of mutinous talk: howls of anguish from the practitioners in the small law firms who didn't enjoy the benefits of the harbour view offices in the Auckland CBD. She's a blunt instrument, your flat tax.

Let's come now to more recent times. You'll recall that with every day of the sad and sorry court case involving the low-flying police officers and their Prime Minister, the PR carnage just grew more bloody. Late in the game, when the verdicts were in, and the fines handed down, the cabinet hit on an excellent wheeze for putting things right, or as it goes these days: achieving closure. They had a whip around.

No doubt you can see where I'm going with this. In rough numbers:

Total cost of pledge cards: about $400,000.

Total number of Labour MPs – 40 or so.

"Donation" per head. $10,000

Hurt? Of course it would hurt. But they might want to consider how much more hurt they could do themselves by passing retroactive legislation of such gob-smacking self-service.

There are threads of validity in their spin. A debate about public funding of election campaigning would be a capital idea. Last time we had one, we managed to agree on a not-bad system for allocating political parties free broadcasting time. We might manage to devise an acceptable extension to that scheme. But that debate is not this one, and it should not be prodded onto the stage as the unlucky act that has to follow one that has so comprehensively bombed.

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