Twas on a Monday morning ...

Robert Fitzroy was the second governor of Nu Zulun back in 1843. But he had other claims to fame. He took Darwin as a companion to the Galapagas Islands.

Well apparently, he woke up one morning (probably a Monday), took uo a razor and slit his throat. Rather a grizzley end. But it gets more intriguing. It seems he had an uncle or such like who set an example of throat slitting some years before.

He also had a captain on a boat he was serving on – earlier in life – who grew depressed, took up a gun and shot himself.

Fitzroy was an ardent believer in the literal interpretation of the Bible and somehow felt responsible that he play a key role in facilitating Darwin’s discoveries and his eventual publication of The origin of Species”.

We're in the money!

Well not really. America's out of the money.
What’s happening in the States involves big numbers. If you can’t count past ten, forget getting your head around this one. We are talking trillions baby!

Now for the mathematically insecure, just what is a trillion. It is 10 multilplied by itself 12 times. Now that doesn’t sound to bad does it? Guess again.

10 x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10 = 1,000,000,000,000 that’s it.

Now in the old YU ES of A, there are about $11 trillion dollars worth of mortgages. Of these, 10% (that is around 1.1 trillion) are in default – they can’t be paid. Now them’s big bucks.

Remember there is only about 2,500,000,000 seconds in the average life time.

So if you earned $1 every second of your life – that is $3,600 every hour of your life you would need 400 of your life-times to get to 1 trillion dollars.

Well, where is this missing trillion going to come from? The good old Yankee tax payer as the government contemplates the big bail out. To the tune of around $3000 dollars for every man woman and child.

The USA has become the USSA - The United Socialist States of America

Save some daylight for me …

The last week in September is upon us in good old Nu Zulun and that means it’s daylight saving time again. Clocks are put 1 hour forward and one hour disappears from each of our lives. That means over 4 million hours are lost here in Nu Zulun! But the upside is, more daylight in the warm summer nights to come, and better sleeping in the early morning hours without birds twittering at 4 am (as would be the case in the height of summer without daylight saving).

So I am a fan. For me, it means, among other things, Monday night fun runs or walks down at the Northcote Tavern (6 pm) followed by a soothing beer and pleasant company. It is a 5 km run or walk – the walkers start 15 minutes before the runners.

So come one and come all!

Daylight saving of one form or another started back in 1929 in New Zealand. It has been as short as the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in March and as long as the first Sunday in September to the last Sunday in April. Indeed from 1941 till the close of WW2, daylight saving covered the entire year – gosh those winter mornings must have been dark, but I guess the upshot was energy saving.

Currently, daylight saving is from the last weekend in September to the first Sunday in April – 27 weeks of uninterrupted bliss.

Sunday morning comin down

The song, whether the Kristofferson or Cash version (Kristofferson wrote it) is one which proffers sad and lonely sentiments and lamentations of one hung over soul negotiating his way through a Sunday. Well, this Sunday just gone by was quite the opposite. My feet hit the floor at 7 am and at 8:00 am with a calm sea and spotless, cloudless azure skies we set off from Milford Beach on a 15 km walk. Our ages ranged from 58 to 70. We are training for Ekiden Relay of October 11. Yours truly has the first lap of 8.7 km.

Oh, oh oh, beautiful Sunday ….
Blue skies, nothing but blue skies …

I'll drink to that

Well the world seems to be headin down the economic plughole - the gurgler if you will.
It was Lao Tze who said in the Tao Te Ching:

"The world is forever out of control ..."

How right he was.

A more modern day sage was that great Scottish entertainer Harry Lauder who had very sound advice for these precarious times in which we live:

Just a wee doch an doris
Just a wee dram that's a
Just a wee doch an doris
afore ye gang awa
There's a wee wifey waitin
In a wee But 'n Ben
If you can say
"It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht"
Then you're all richt, ye ken

Take it away Harry Baby!

A very loose translation might be:

Have one more wee whiskey - a wee drink for the road before you go home to your wee wife waiting in your small country cottage. If you can still manage to talk without slurring your words then you're not too drunk.

Oh and that final bit if you can say it's a beautiful bright moonlit night then you're all right - you understand?

By the way Whiskey means "water of life".

It’s all about clichés and catch phrases at the end of the day.

The silly election season has finally dawned. We are in for the plethora of clichés and catch phrases. Statement by the two antagonists Clark and Key are often prefaced with “it’s all about ..”

It’s all about a fair deal for all New Zealanders.
It’s all about health care and education
It’s all about tax cuts for ordinary New Zealanders.
It’s all about who you can trust.

It about all you can stand ….

Is that a black hole before me I see?

Well we haven’t disappeared down a black hole yet. The Large Hadron Collider is up and running. To those of us with a fascination for things sub-atomic and quantum, it is exciting stuff. Don’t ya just love the old Spooky action at a distance? What a slap in the face for the speed of light.

Well those old protons are getting round rather fast up there in the and Higgs Boson is the name any self respecting parent should call that next child.

This particle accelerator is 27 km in circumference – do the maths and that’s a little under 9 km in diameter. The protons will be getting up to around 99.999999% of light speed. Now remember the number of decimal places really counts in the quantum world! They are accelerated by large supercooled magnets. Now, don’t forget a proton has some substantial mass (compared to an electron) so that is a big call!

Okay then these protons slam into one another. The protons cover the circuit 11,000 times in one second (faster than Usain Bolt). They are looking for Higgs Boson. Steven hawking reckons they won’t find it and has put $100 where his mouth is.

Who Wants to be a Pauper – Nu Zulun?

She left without so much as a brass razoo. A sad start to Who Wants to be a Millionaire . And a very lonely start to Nu Zulun’s version of WWBM And it wasn’t her fault. She was a bright reasonably intelligent young woman. The questions were ridiculously tough for the first $1000. Her phone-a-friend (a school principle) didn’t know what make the fleet of ministerial cars were. I had a good idea it was BMA, but certainly wasn’t 100% .

Compare the early questions with the Australian or British version of the show. The Australian and British questions were more pedestrian – designed to get most contestants to the $1000 mark. But not old penny pinching TV ONE.

It also had none of the egalitarian feel of the British and Australian shows, where ten people had to compete to get the seat. The old fastest finger first trick. Here, however ,we had one person, chosen by what means we have no idea, groomed for the seat. The second guy was a PHD.

As for Mike Hosking, the guy should stick to interviewing. TV ONE seems to constantly recycle the same old personalities with their assorted head-dressings. Hosking was certainly not in the league of Chris Tarrant who knows the meaning of “be spontaneous”.

It was of course filmed in Melbourne with a bunch of kiwi expats for the audience – more unadulterated penny pinching.

Buses are breaking down all over.

Some mornings you wonder if you will ever get to work. Why do buses break down when I am on them?

I have been involved with two bus break downs this week. The first, a leaky radiator saw us all briskly bundled off the bendy bus at Smales Farm and left to fend for our own vedices. The second was a bus that never arrived. It had “broken down”.

The company is North Star and they seem to be having some trouble maintaining their buses.

More bus bemoanings:



New buses whose door won’t open and close properly.

Ticket machines that swallow passenger cards

Those police adverts about their exciting jobs - they can keep it!

The person sitting next to you whose headphones are set at a deafening roar.

The leakey roofs and windows

Still a thumbs ups to the usually helpful and patient drivers!

But wait, hang on, get a grip, there's more!!!!

Just when you thought it could not get worse. That is the being-on-hold-clutching-a-telephone-waiting-in-line-to-speak-to-someone-while listening-to-ghastly-music experience.

It gets worse. Coming to a town near you (if it hasn’t already) we have telephone-on-hold advertising. That is while you have to wait to speak to another human, you will face the ignominy of being force-fed insane advertising down your lucky-old-ear-hole.

Winston weariness

The country of Nu Zulun is suffering from Winston weariness. The never-ending stupefying saga of “who gave what to NZ First and who knew about it” has driven thousands across these three fair islands to abandon newspapers and give up watching the news on television.

While the media have a field day in their feasting frenzy, fatigue is all that is registering with “ordinary Nu Zulundus”.

Exhausted kiwis are taking refuge from the tedium by watching paint dry, sewing tight any loose buttons, cutting their lawns with a pair of small scissors and collecting haggis recipes.

Where, they ask, have the heady days of “Man bites dog” gone?