Did you miss me? Exams and a recalcitrant internet connection have kept me away from blogging until today. Not sure if I have missed much. Perhaps the best summary of the last 10 days is: “politicians lie”. Not exactly earth-shaking stuff. Exhibit A: The Thrilling One denies that his daughter has ever taken drugs, despite [...]

I wanted to title this post “much ado about nothing” but it’s just too hackneyed. But that is exactly what I think of the Russell Norman Protest Saga. I’ve seen a lot of outrage over Norman’s treatment with, hilariously, a great deal of nationalistic fervour from the left. Even some of my right wing compatriots [...]

An OECD report shows that New Zealand has almost the lowest “Tax wedge” (Individual tax as a percentage of labour costs) in the OECD. Enter Russell Norman attempting to claim that “the report showed the Government was misleading people that New Zealand had high taxes, to justify tax cuts for the highest-earners”. Unfortunately, the Herald [...]

What is it with the media’s obsession with the death toll on the road over Easter? Black Easter claims nine Black Easter? How is this Easter any more dark than any other? Thousands have taken to the roads over the weekend. The laws of statistics have reared their ugly head and we have had our [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]