Just so we understand each other, I consider the entire Charles-Chauvel/Noisy-Kids-in-airplane episode to be slightly less newsworthy than “cat stuck in tree”. My interest in the affair can be accurately gauged by comparing the entire mass of the earth to the full stop at the end of this sentence. The only relevant result is that [...]

In case you were wondering whether the traditional book publishers were as clueless about the digital age as the MSM and the recording industry the answer is YES. AppleInsider reports that the publishers are complaining that they do not get enough profit from e-books.
Publishers get roughly half — $13 — of the selling price of [...]

Not much time for blogging tonight but I could resist a quick comment on the low-hanging fruit offered by ScrubOne in this comment. The Yahoo “news” item reads:
I feed my son marijuana
While most parents are focussed on warning their children about the dangers of drugs, mum-of-three Mieko Hester-Perez is happily dishing up marijuana to her [...]

The Herald on Sunday contains articles on two extremely misfortunate deaths. The first is Lam Xuan Hu, a 24-year-old Vietnamese student who died when a wheel from a truck, traveling in the opposite direction on the freeway in Auckland, came adrift and crashed through a bus. This unfortunate young man, a recent arrival to New [...]

Just to keep the “Evil Labtests” story ticking over (before the next big story where the HDC tells you it has received 20,000 complaints about labtests – all from a little old lady in Palmerston North), the Herald tells us about a wrong result. And how it made a patient worried. Not dead, just worried.
And [...]

If ever there was a good illustration of the parochial nature of New Zealand’s media, it is the furor over Bill English’s government limo parking on a dotted yellow line. In the grand scheme of things, I would rate this as a 0.5/10 – right up there with “cat gets stuck in tree” (Daring Rescue [...]

And with the the words of Pink Floyd’s Money echoing in our ears, we comment on the the Herald’s somewhat exaggerated headline GP clinics stash reserves of $115m. While the total is correct, the word stashed has the same pejorative meaning as Pink Floyd’s version – a pile of money that someone is hoarding. This [...]

I see the Tabloid on Sunday is running true to form. Their front page advertises “The MP, his lover and his angry wife…” which turns out to be an article of Rodney Hide’s use of perks to take his girlfriend overseas. Now I am not going to argue whether this was right or wrong, though [...]

Presumably, journalists are starting to run out of new angles on the Tsunami story. Today in the Dom Post there is a breathless story about how John Key’s Motorcade sped past unprotected children playing by the roadside at 3 times the speed limit in Samoa apparently because John Key needed a shower before his flight. [...]

Following the media circus (New Zealand media, at any rate) that is John Key in the US, one can’t help have a little sympathy for Fran O’Sullivan’s severe attack of cultural cringe in her Saturday Column. She wails:
Why is it that the travelling press troupe following John Key about in New York are sending back mountains [...]