Recent Posts...
Page 156 of 262
Archive
Plonkers | Oct 20, 2006 10:52
I really can't pick tomorrow night's Air New Zealand Cup final, but I'll tell you one thing for free: if the commentary is as bad as it was during last Friday's Auckland-Wellington semi, well … actually nothing will happen, because a knowledge of the rules and an ability to discuss the game intelligently are clearly not a prerequisite for a commentary job with Sky.
Time after time, Richard Turner and Murray Mexted got the wrong end of the stick, failed to comprehend calls that were evident to anyone with a pair of ears/eyes, blathered right through key turnovers, lost lineouts and the like, and generally subtracted, rather than added value.
This isn't anything new from Mexted, whose ratio of been-there-done-that-that nuggets of insight to outright incomprehension generally runs about 1:20, but putting him together with Turner took things to a whole new place. And not a good place either.
There's a a clip of Willie Mason mouthing off during the Kiwis' haka last Saturday, and then being well and truly pwned by David Kidwell. Almost makes up for losing the actual game.
Reaching back into the archives, a clip of that awesome, audacious end-to-end try scored by Carlos Spencer at Jade in 2004. The uploader has some other rugby stuff.
Jonathan Ah Kit notes that Dino the dinosaur, star of the White Island Volcanocam these past two and a half years, is hanging in and apparently still in good nick, defying predictions that acid fumes would melt his ickle plastic coat. Amazing.
Loving the Late Late Show's Bush is drinking again clip.
Borat interviewed by Jon Stewart on Night of Too Many Stars. Borat's very funny, but I do feel a little bit sorry for Kazakhstan. My impression (garnered through a fascinating Channel 4 documentary called, Kazakhstan Swings) is that it's actually quite an interesting place. By way of contrast, Sacha Baron Cohen, out of character on the Daily Show a couple of years ago. He's so … urbane.
Update: Lyndon Hood points out that the story du jour in Kazakhstan is that they've misspelled the Kazakh for "bank" on their new banknotes. Oh dear.
A new YouTube user called sackorats has a live clip of the Chills performing 'Satin Doll' and some other interesting stuff.
And finally, NZ On Air has declined funding for another series of the comedy news quiz Off the Wire, apparently on the grounds that it's not-New-Zealand-enough. If you'd like to make comment on that decision, feel free to hit the reply button below and I can ensure it gets to the right people.
Astroturf | Oct 19, 2006 12:12
When I got up on Monday I didn't expect to spend most of the week writing about breast cancer and Herceptin, but this story, which appeared yesterday in the Guardian, cannot go unremarked.
It refers to a new pan-European advocacy group, Cancer United, which has been pitched as "a pioneering effort by a coalition of doctors, nurses and patients to push for equal access to cancer care across the EU," but which turns out to be entirely funded by Roche, the company that produces Herceptin and another new cancer drug, Avastin.
The new campaign's secretariat is not an independent charitable organisation, but a PR company. And not just any PR company. It's Shandwick Weber. You know how Google's company motto is "Don't be evil"? You could say that Shandwick's is one word shorter.
Sourcewatch has the Shandwick backgrounder. It includes a reference to the Timberlands saga in New Zealand, which, of course, also centred on a fake grassroots advocacy group.
The Guardian story includes this passage:
However, one of the UK's leading cancer experts, Michel Coleman from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the Guardian he had grave concerns about Cancer United.
"Governments will no doubt be pressed to fund a big increase in expenditure on cancer drugs - on the entirely spurious grounds that such an increase has been proven to increase national survival rates. I wonder if all the dignitaries on the executive board of Cancer United are aware of this murky background.
"Cancer patient groups should think twice before accepting sponsorship from Cancer United."
Coleman was also highly critical of Cancer United's reliance on single study which links patient survival to the amount their governments spend on drugs. He described it as "woefully simplistic research... This is clearly nonsense. For most cancers, higher survival results from earlier diagnosis and a combination of expert surgery and/or radiotherapy, as well as from the use of cancer drugs."
The study is particularly interesting in light of a new review from Denmark's Cochrane Centre, which compared meta-analyses of cancer studies and found that analyses funded by drug companies "tended to recommend the experimental drug without reservation," while those not funded by big pharma reached quite different conclusions.
The Cochrane Centre spokesman said that the drug company-funded analyses were often queered by the fact that they only used information from the companies' own databases and that the centre would ignore such studies in future. Unfortunately, these studies often appear in respectable medical journals.
Roche has a particular interest in turning the focus of public health strategies towards new cancer drugs. Those new drugs are the main reason that its latest quarterly sales were up 20% to $US8.3 billion. The company now has an application in for European Union approval for the use of Herceptin in conjunction with hormonal therapy, which analysts say would add hundreds of millions to its annual sales.
This is fine in itself: profit provides the motive to undertake such expensive research, and embrace the risk of equally expensive failure. Capitalism's good like that. But it behoves us to recognise that profit, and not altruism, is the motive behind what Roche says and does. That's how capitalism works. The sums of money at stake here are vast. And, if, as the Cochrane Centre asserts, that money is distorting academic research, then something truly odious is going on.
Auckland Hospital associate professor of oncology Vernon Harvey wrote a very clear and useful behind-the-hype commentary on cancer treatments for the Herald yesterday, which outlines the drug treatments that are available to women here in advance of funding in either Britain or Australia (that 60 Minutes report just looks worse every day, doesn't it?), but have received "little fanfare" in the media. I wonder why that would be?
He continues:
When I ask my patients what they think will happen if they get Herceptin, they answer that their chances of survival will increase by 50 per cent.
When I ask them what will happen if they don't get it, the answer is that they will die. Neither of these is true. Medicine is seldom as black and white as the media would like to portray it, or as simple as our patients subsequently perceive it to be.
Herceptin is an exciting therapy for a particular type of breast cancer - cancers with positive HER2 receptors - but not quite the wonder drug portrayed in the media.
With what, in the context of this week's debate, amounts to monumental stupidity, the paper placed Harvey's column behind its silly Premium Content paywall, but you should just go in the back door and read it.
True story: I woke up this morning to the sound of a man shouting about the police. I thought there must be some sort of fracas on the street outside (it has been known to happen), but it turned out to be Gerry Brownlee on the radio, doing his Angry Man thing in Parliament. Brownlee clearly has a talent for this (but where's Don?) but some of his colleagues aren't quite so good at it. Watching Lockwood Smith try and keep his game face on, on the TV news last night, was hilarious.
I partially agree with Mr Slack on the happenings in Parliament this week. The validating legislation was necessary to validate expenditure made in good faith all the way back to 1989, but scooting it through in a rush was not. But I also think Brownlee's bitching about the new, ultra-cautious approach from Parliamentary Services is bloody rich.
Parliamentary Services, slated in the Auditor General's report for rubber-stamping what he subsequently deemed to be unlawful expenditure, now clearly doesn't know what's permissible and what isn't. So it has flagged as a "point of discussion" the status of MPs' Christmas cards, funded out of its budget. Take it away Gerry:
"They (Parliamentary Service) have been fired up by Michael Cullen and Co who are simply acting out of deep guilt over their own flagrant misuse and abuse of parliamentary funds," said National Party deputy Gerry Brownlee.
"What they are wanting to do is become the tick box thing. So I say I want to buy a new set of pens for my office, they'll say yes or no to that.
"I'll need some new letterhead paper, they'll say yes or no to that. I'd like to go home at the end of the parliamentary week – yes or no. These people are massively overstepping the mark and getting in the road of the free operation of a democracy."
This is, of course, what all the other parties have been saying while National has been loudly insisting that the AG's report throws up no problems at all. And some of the communications deemed unlawful by Kevin Brady would seem to have a bit more to do with the "free operation of democracy" than taxpayer-funded Christmas cards.
I've been surprised that there hasn't been more comment on a little column by Richard Prebble, tucked away in the Herald on Sunday. Prebble reports that he was dinged by Brady to the tune of $192, for placing an advertisement for a public meeting held before the announcement of an election in which he wasn't even standing. Prebble sums up the problem (the words in square brackets are his, not mine):
The Solicitor-General has examined High Court rulings, including Winston Peters' case over spending on the Tauranga election and determined that if my advertisement had said, "come and hear Richard Prebble criticise government policy", that would have been OK. But as the advertisement said "and hear our alternative policy", it was campaigning. [The wags will say this explains why National did not offend - they had no policy] …
It seems nuts to me that MPs can spend taxpayer money criticising policy but not on saying what their alternative is. The rules will have to be changed.
New interim rules are being drawn up and will be presented to Brady for approval. Which makes sense, because at the moment, he and the Solicitor-General appear to be the only ones who know where the goalposts actually are.
PS: TVNZ head of programming Annemarie Duff is going to be spending more time with her family from the end of this year. Given the ratings trend, it's hardly surprising. I wonder if that desire to wean TV1 off its "heavy reliance on British product" will survive her departure.
You say it like it's a bad word | Oct 18, 2006 10:42
On our three-weekly turn on Breakfast today, Deborah Hill Cone raised the matter of the Prime Minister slinging off at "right-wing blogger" Fran O'Sullivan on Newstalk ZB. She said the same thing on bFM this week too. Now, Fran is not unaware of the blogosphere, and has posted the odd comment at times. She's even been outed as a craven puppet of Helengrad on Sir Humphreys, whose commentators are always generous, fair and thoughtful in their opinions. But she is not a blogger, she's a journalist.
But it wasn't just the characterisation, it was the emphasis: "right-wing blogger", as if that last word was the worst insult she could reach for. Granted, there are those in the 'sphere who are probably regarded as verbally incontinent lunatics with anger issues by their own mothers. And clearly, anyone who blogs about their cat should be suffocated in their sleep. But surely not the lovely Jessie, or the assiduous Jonathan?
Anyway, I've marnused myself. Once I'd got over chortling at certain uber-geeks not being able pick up the Exclusive Brethren MySpace page as satire, I wrote a Listener column on satirical MySpace pages created in the names of well-known people. I also noted a couple that seemed legit - including the one bearing the name of Rodney Hide.
But as Wellington schoolboy Master Samuel Flynn Scott pointed out to me by electronic mail, "Rad Rod" is not yer actual Act Party leader, as Rodney himself has said. It just seemed so … plausible. So what about the other two I thought looked non-satirical? Theresa Gattung and Leighton Smith? Any intelligence on those?
Speaking of Rodney Hide, I've had to bail out of recording Off the Wire tonight (I'm sending an undercover operative to the Tuis, too) but he will be appearing on the OTW panel, at 6.30pm at the Classic this evening. You can email tickets@thedownlowconcept.com to book, or, if you forget, just turn up. It's free.
And I'll be back in Nelson again on Sunday, being interviewed over brunch by Matt Lawrey as part of the Nelson Arts Festival. Tickets and details are here.
Auckland City councillor Richard Simpson (no MySpace profile, so far as I am aware) got in touch to say thanks to all the people who read his proposal here for building the Rugby World Cup stadium on the Carlaw Park/Domain site:
One interesting suggestion that has come forward is to incorporate the Albert Park Tunnel into the scheme (with travellator).his connects the bottom of Constitution Hill (effectively opposite Carlaw Park) directly to Victoria St (see map below). The tunnel is apparently two car widths wide and flat enough so it could service a travellator as well as access points from the University and other places along the way.
In addition to servicing major events during the working week, this could be integrated into a scheme for reducing cars in the central city by encouraging people to park in the podium of the Stadium. It also could encourage people to commute by rail - with a Stadium station at Carlaw Park servicing the University, and the travellator taking people to destinations across the campus. It is critical for Auckland to leverage from the RWC to get people out of cars and onto rail - Carlaw Park is the only site that will achieve this, and can be delivered in 4 years.
A couple of readers suggested to me that it was a fine idea, but too late, because redevelopment for the site has already been approved. Richard doesn't think so:
There is a development in the process of seeking resource consent on the site - they have been through the urban design panel on two occasions. I understand it is for a retirement home. Government and Council both have some statutory powers that could be pulled, but in terms of developing an old peoples home - I would think a prudent developer could negotiate favourable terms with a land swap. Eden Park would be a far better location, rather than the current location sunk in beside a railway line an tucked in behind the Caltex Service station.
How the last C&R Now-ruled council ever allowed an old peoples home come to being allowed to be developed on original Domain land in this location so well serviced by rail and high infrastructure must rate as the all time nadir in planning, custodianship and urban design. I hope good sense will prevail and we can repair this potential damage and escalate Carlaw Park as a properly considered alternative to the travesties being now proposed on the waterfront.
At any rate, the idea has legs enough for Richard to have been invited by Mike Lee and Bob Harvey to present his idea to the Mayoral Forum this Friday. Meanwhile, the government decision on stadium plans has been delayed. It's a shame this idea has emerged so late in the piece, but it seems to me to embody fewer problems and more benefits than the other proposals.
Thanks for all the responses to my lashing of the 60 Minutes programme on breast cancer treatment and Herceptin yesterday. Some people welcomed the logic but still believed the drug should be funded, and perhaps they're right. But I'd still like the issue to be examined properly by the media. Paul Brislen, who wrote us a marvellous guest post on living with cancer, said:
I often wonder which PR firm the drug companies are using - they appear to be very good at getting "Wonder Drug Not Available" stories into the mainstream media, typically TV. I was quite impressed with a Metro article on it all a few years ago that pointed out how media savvy and big business the drug companies are - when will Metro put its archives online I wonder...
I have a growing unease about the quality of NZ journalism these days and I'm not sure it's going to improve any time soon. Am I just getting old or are all the Bright Young Things getting into PR instead?
Richard Llewellyn said:
In my view Pharmac have done a poor job of explaining to the general public how funding decisions are made and how health funding in general is a constant balancing act requiring consultation and compromise designed to provide most good to most people for least cost, we simply can't afford to fund everything.
Likewise, Roche, and other Big Pharma companies, have done a poor job in explaining the exorbitant long term costs of R&D and the need to recover those costs through the price of drugs, and have done far too GOOD a job in hyping the potential benefits of new drugs in order to stimulate demand.
And the medical profession, who use the tools of drugs for the livelihood, have always been too easily in thrall to the lerks and perks of Big Pharma, and have always been piss-poor communicators in terms of informing patients of the full pros and cons of each drug.
And the people at the end of the chain, the patients, are understandably viewed through a media prism of helpless victim at the mercy of larger forces.
Phil Stewart said:
So glad you raised this. Watching the report last night raised my blood pressure to an unhealthy level. I also note the Australian woman they chose looked fit, healthy and well groomed, while her kiwi "counterpart", poor thing, looked haggard and strung out by comparison - just to hit home the point.
Vaughan seems to be a soft target for lobby groups all right. The piece he did on animal welfare a few weeks ago was an absolute shocker. His idea of balance for the animal rights advocates was to interview the Feds' Charlie Pederson - another extremist who is a total embarrassment to most farmers. There was no attempt to interview any actual animal welfare science experts, I guess because, like the breast cancer debate there are too many inconvenient details and subtleties to package easily into this low-rent current affairs format. A man of Vaughan's experience should know better.
Maureen Jansen picked the the issue of who might or should miss out if millions of dollars go into Herceptin, and questioned for funding for procedures for the very old:
When my mother in law was 91 and in the mid to late stages of Alzheimers she was given a cataract operation. She died two years later after a steady decline. I'm sure there were people decades younger languishing on waiting lists ...
I had ovarian cancer 10 years ago and received Taxol treatment because I was lucky enough to live in one of the two areas where it was funded. As the gold standard treatment, it nevertheless had only a small chance of 'curing' me whereas the other chemos had less chance. I was very grateful for the opportunity for long term survival because one of my children was a young teenager. The desire to raise your children is up there with the survival instinct in its own right. The wish to look after and protect them is a strong primeval urge which so many women I was in hospital with shared.
I have recovered from a Stage 3C cancer and remained healthy for 10 years. Who knows what cured me exactly? Taxol could certainly be one of the contributing factors!
If Herceptin is seen by many countries as an improvement on standard breast cancer chemo for some women, why can't it be funded? These women need every chance they can get. The arguments used here about Herceptin remind me of the arguments against Taxol when I was sick. The Auckland District Health Board didn't fund it for example. I know Herceptin is very expensive but for goodness sake, if there is a small chance it will work the investment will be well worth it. Funding it for the terminally ill here in NZ when other countries fund it for the newly ill goes against the grain. Even if the improved chance of survival is small, it is still there. Why not give it to people who just might benefit from it in the long term, the way I did from Taxol?
I am not against old people. I am 60 years old, but I hope that hip operations and cataract operations are not wasted on me when I'm virtually non compos mentis. I'd like the money to go to young mothers and people in their prime, just as I got a chance of life when I was younger.
Thoughtful stuff, no? But I can't help but think that such a resourcing decision would create its own crop of angry deadlines and emotional raging. Remember in 1997, when the Northland man Rau Williams didn't get renal dialysis, because, in the final stages of renal failure and suffering from dementia, he didn't qualify for it? There was a huge media circus around that, but the Health and Disability Commissioner, while finding some fault with cultural sensitivity, found that the doctors acted correctly.
Interestingly, Helen Clark, as Opposition leader, joined Bill English in backing Northland Health, while then government MPs John Banks and Tau Henare broke ranks to join the media scrum. (Act MP Heather Roy later claimed that the case of Williams, "who was denied dialysis on medical grounds, was championed by the (then opposition) Labour Party," but she was just making stuff up.) I think National, which has strongly politicised the Herceptin issue - it featured in a highly emotional context in two major Brash speeches recently - should perhaps be asked how it would have done things differently.
And one more thing about the 60 minutes item: it looked at the Australian system of integrated care and implied that nothing of the kind existed here. The Australian strategy is, over years, the key reason that breast cancer survival rates are better across the Tasman. We're at least five years behind, but the idea that this kind of care isn't practised here now is simply wrong. It is, and it's based on the Australian experience. And that was just another thing the programme got wrong in its rush to offer listeners a view dictated, more than anything, by someone else's PR.
Tricky issues | Oct 17, 2006 11:47
With the latest allegations against Taito Philip Field, Helen Clark had little choice but to invite the police to decide who is telling the truth: her former minister - and currently suspended MP - or the Thai tiler who now says he was promised a visa in return for doing unpaid work on Field's house in Samoa.
Frankly, Field has been dog tucker in one way or another for months, and the latest round of allegations seem the clearest and most serious yet. But for Labour there's a world of difference in electorate politics between the police bringing a prosecution and the party precipitately giving him the chop. It seems fair to say that the only people who value Field's presence are in the National Party.
Meanwhile, our guest commentator, "Rex", gets the Kiwiblog treatment.
Last night's 60 Minutes programme on Pharmac's refusal to extend funding of the breast cancer drug Herceptin (it is presently only funded to extend the lives of women with advanced breast cancer) was a Rod Vaughan special: emotive and uninformative.
The decision seems harsh, but perhaps if Vaughan hadn't spent so much of his report chanting the same phrase about how many New Zealand women were going to die he could have asked a New Zealand representative to explain it. He could have talked a New Zealand doctor. He could have spoken to Women's Health Action director Jo Fitzpatrick who this week endorsed Pharmac's decision:
"They're right to be cautious about it. From media reports, you would think if you got Herceptin, that was going to be your saviour; you were going to live," she said. "But it's not the difference between life and death for most women."
The New Zealand Federation of Women's Health Councils has expressed a similar view. Not that you would have picked that up from Vaughan's report: the New Zealand patient was going to die and the Australian patient (who, it slipped out, had a lower risk of reoccurrence before treatment) was going to live. Simple as that.
Vaughan could have looked at identical controversies overseas, including in Britain, where it went all the way to the Court of Appeal, and Australia, where Fran Boyle, the Australian oncologist who was so critical of New Zealand policy in the report was until recently equally critical of the Australian funding stance. He could have asked the company marketing it, Roche, why it's so expensive (the Scoop report linked to there also notes a typically wild statistical misstatement on risk rate reduction by Susan Wood on Close Up).
He might have looked at the Guardian story from earlier this year, The selling of a wonder drug, which looked at the way Roche, the company marketing Herceptin, funds advocacy groups. Or this story from April in Cancer World, which began thus:
Herceptin may turn out to be the biggest advance in treating breast cancer since tamoxifen. But if we are to prevent soaring drugs bills eating up our health budgets or barring Europe's poorer patients from the latest therapies, cancer professionals will have to wrest back the debate from the unfettered hype of the mass media.
The story, which is really worth reading, notes the research on the short-term Herceptin treatment Pharmac says it is investigating, suggests that the widely-aired claim that 22 OECD countries are funding it already is not quite what it seems, and observes that Herceptin isn't the last word, but the first of a new generation of cancer treatments (including others for breast cancer) that cannot all be funded without bringing down public health systems.
Vaughan might also have pondered who would miss out if full treatment - amounting to around half the annual hospital drug budget - had been approved. In the Canadian province of Ontario, among the first to fast-track approval and funding last year, multiple myeloma patients asked why their expensive wonder-drug wasn't being funded too. The neighbouring province of British Columbia funded Herceptin by cutting off funding for the treatment of other cancer sufferers.
Vaughan might also have asked National's campaigning MP Jackie Blue how such funding would have been accommodated under National's own health budget (clue: it wouldn't).
But I guess that would have been a bit more work. Women with breast cancer have every right to advocate for a better treatment, and to feel desperately angry that it's not available. None of us would probably feel any different. But I think our current affairs professionals owe it to us to look at such issues properly, and not dash off one-sided, disease-of-the-week efforts like that.
Scramble | Oct 13, 2006 11:29
If Kevin Brady was a judge, would he be accused of judicial activism? It seems a fair question, because he has certainly changed the landscape without changing the law. This is not to suggest his findings are wrong - I don't claim the legal expertise to say anything of the kind, let alone to contradict the solicitor general, who saw the issue along similar lines to Mr Brady - but he has left a situation that cannot stand at the next election. There will be new law.
Labour, at last, says it is paying the money back - as it had to, on both moral and political grounds - while the Greens (and presumably United Future) may wait on the result of a legal challenge being proposed by New Zealand First. As No Right Turn points out, nearly all the Greens' Parliamentary spending in 05-06 has been declared unlawful. The validity of monthly newsletters and public meetings as legal forms of communication under the present funding system is in doubt.
An enterprising reader at Kiwiblog (feel free to click through if you want to read angry loons comparing New Zealand to Burma, Cuba and North Korea) calculated unlawful spending by parties per vote received:
1. NZF; $1.16 per vote
2. United; $1.05 per vote
3. Labour; $0.82 per vote
4. Green; $0.67 per vote
5. Act; $0.52 per vote
6. National; $0.01 per vote 7. Maori; $0.001 per vote
8. Progressive - none
And what percentage of overall advertising (actually, I think it would be more correct say "advertising and communications") on the part of the various parties was found to be in breach:
1. Green; 69.6%
2. NZF; 66.7%
3. Labour; 66.1%
4 United; 47.7%
5 ACT; 10.4%
6 National; 8.1%
7 Maori; 1.8%
8 Progressive; 0.0%
Brady also had harsh words for Parliamentary Services, which it appears didn't understand the rules either. National's unlawful spending was on the light side because it (a) picked up the Auditor General's pre-election signal and erred on the side of caution, and/or (b) it was awash in private money anyway and could do what it wanted.
But all parties, National included, plainly used their Parliamentary Services funding to campaign in this election: staff paid by the public essentially worked for their party campaigns; MPs flew free around the country to drum up votes.
There is a danger here: if a very broad view of what constitutes electoral advertising is to become the new practice, the party with the wealthiest chums has a huge advantage. It seems likely that National's ability to draw its dosh from an anonymous trust will be challenged by other parties, as it should be.
The Auditor General's findings may represent a necessary application of rectitude to a system that had drifted off course - and he has a mandate to do that. But if we're to focus on preserving the integrity of the system, we should look at the other side too, particularly with regard to transparency.
Anyway, the essay by "Rex" on the AG's report landed with me this morning, and I decided to publish it (even though we don't normally publish anonymous work), if only as a counterpoint to the bellowing certainties of the New Zealand Herald's editorial today.
Moving on, I had a highly convivial time in Nelson with Off the Wire. We recorded a good little show before a boutique audience at Yaza - you can hear it at 2.30pm tomorrow afternoon on Radio Live, and subsequently as an MP3 to be posted here - and then (along with Matt Lawrey, Grant Smithies and some Nelson Arts Festival people) spent some hours debriefing at Harry's Bar, which served good, reasonably-priced food of various Asian persuasions, and a wide range of refreshing beverages. Smithies and Lawrey then led us to another establishment where the young waitress sped along our deliberations on what drinks to order by suggesting "just fucking sort it out, guys." Heh. Gotta love that rustic regional charm.
I also liked the Rutherford Hotel, where we stayed. You can see in the "virtual tour" panoramas of the rooms that the place sits somewhat unevenly between its original 1972 design identity - New Zealand modernist - and later applications of standard hotel blandness. I would go so far as to say they've bollocksed it up in places. The standard rooms still have wicked retro chic wood veneer feature walls; the "executive" rooms have boring white walls - and they've taken out the funky wooden console between the beds.
The hotel (officially opened by Norm Kirk!) made a good period fit for Paul Shannon's Davey Darling, of which I read a good chunk on the plane, having belatedly taken possession of the household copy. I am not an expert but I really like this book. I grew up largely in Christchurch around the same time that Paul did, and there's a world he captures that has now gone by. It's a great read, full of blood, piss and humour. As a professional writer of non-fiction, I often find myself judging fiction at the level of the sentence; a measure by which works as disparate as the Harry Potter books and stonedogs irritate the hell out of me. But not this one.
The totally cool World of Warcraft episode of South Park is now on YouTube. Torrents in the usual places too.
Greg Lane sent in a belated response to the coffee series we did a while back:
I saw my first flat white in the Omotesando area of Tokyo this week. Under a big sandwich board reading "What is a flat white?" was an explanation that stated that a flat white is 1 part espresso to 3 parts milk. Although this didn't sound right to me, I laid down my 650yen ($NZ8.20!) and a very professional looking barista proceeded to work his magic - no push button Starbucks machines here. Despite the erroneous description on the sign, it was indeed a quite passable flat white.
There seems to be some kind of campaign to promote the flat white - driven by the Japan Milk Producers Association.
Can anybody say "missed opportunity?"NZ coffee roasters, Fonterra and NZ Trade & Enterprise should be all over this!
Funny you should mention that, Greg. Here's the column I wrote for Unlimited all the way back in February …
And, finally, those of you suffering Che Tibby withdrawal will be delighted to know that he has reinvented himself in the less controversial role of a sporting commentator with The Dropkicks podcast.
Page 156 of 262
Archive