John Banks was given a very important job when government was formed after the November election, a position named Minister with Special Responsibility for Keeping His Month Shut for the Next 36 Months and Not Embarrassing the Government.
Would all of you who picked 26 weeks in the nationwide pool please raise your hands to claim your prizes. Judges will be around shortly to check your tickets.
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I don’t usually pay much attention to the big NZ political blogs. At best, the usual suspects are occasionally insightful, but more often they suffer from varying degrees of simple minded egotism and/or outright vileness. However, like the million monkeys writing Shakespeare that they as a group resemble, every so often someone hits one out of the park:
It’s hard work at the best of times for political parties to attract good candidates. But it’s doubly so for the two main parties, because all the smaller parties are so quick to secure the urine-drinking bank-robbing identity-thieves, leaving National and Labour only the boring and sensible candidates to choose from.
Apart from the woman-bothering expense-rorting ones, those who end up in Parliament for the Nats or Labour often lack colour, but that’s probably because they’re not drinking their own piss…
The rest of it is well worth reading as well.
This election is going to be like the Rugby World Cup – pretty much a foregone conclusion but the also-rans will provide much entertainment.
Yes, it is the long rumoured American version of Outrageous Fortune. Actually, according to Wikipedia, it is the second attempt at a US remake – the first did not get past the pilot stage. It will be interesting to see if it turns up here.
It is not everyday that I awaken to the radio telling me that Civil Defense has been activated due to the imminent arrival of a Tsunami.
Luckily the effects of the Tsunami on New Zealand were slight to non-existent, but not totally unnoticed. The following chart is from the excellent GeoNet web site. GeoNet (amongst other things) maintains a system of tsunami gauges around the country for just this sort of event.
The graph on the GeoNet site is a moving window so I have copied a static version here. I took graph snapshot at about 11pm, you can clearly see the waves hit different parts of the country in succession start from about 9:30am at Raoul Island (I didn’t know where it was either). Luckily for us there was nothing over a metre.
Samoa was not so fortunate as we were in NZ, with many fatalities in low lying areas despite a very speedy evacuation.
One of my favourite things about browsing the web on Mondays is seeing what is new over at coverfreak.com, a weekly blog with links to interesting covers of (usually) familar songs. Normally I wouldn’t mention it, but this week they have a selection of songs with a New Zealand flavour.
The links to songs usually disappear within a couple of weeks, so be in quick if you want to listen.