Island Life by David Slack

The question looming largest in my mind at the moment is: what will happen to Tony Soprano this Monday? I try to distract myself by considering the official cash rate, and David Haywood’s bolshy mate Bollard. But that just gets me thinking about the exchange rate. 75 cents! It could go to 80, John Key says, and he’s supposed to know about These Things.

My patriotic export revenue-earning business can stand an exchange rate at par; a more advantageous one is icing on the cake. But you get nostalgic for the old days. At 40 cents it was aaaaaall icing, baby.

One needs always to be thinking about the new business opportunities in these uncertain times. In the last month my inbox has been filling with messages from friends and acquaintances contemplating fresh business ventures and looking for tips.

Restructuring can be bloody: the banks, the telcos, and of course the current Nightmare on Hobson Street. I wish I could say I had a specific suggestion for each person who drops me a line, but I don’t. Or rather, I don’t have safe, solid ones. My line runs to the more wacky and fanciful. You shouldn’t knock wacky and fanciful. Wacky and fanciful can be the seedbed for the good idea that eventually emerges.

People say: but that’s so obvious, why didn’t I think of that! And I think, well, maybe that’s because it emerged from an idea that was so ludicrous you’d have just laughed if I’d said it out loud.

So look, here are two frankly stupid ideas I had this week. Maybe you should take a look. Perhaps you can find a pony somewhere inside the horseshit.

Inspiration Number One: KiwiSaviour
If you have a church like Bishop Brian's, you’ll love this. One per cent rising to four is for pikers; make your worshippers a better offer! Say to them Give us your savings, and we’ll give you back tenfold in the sweet by and by.

If they keep ponying up 10% in the collection plate, you promise them, you'll match it with a full 20% which you’ll put into a special account for them to use in the afterlife.

Always Be Closing. Remind them what kind of table that will buy them when they’re dining in the Lord’s home!

Inspiration Number Two: The World Cup We Can Never Lose.
Bringing home the odd Americas Cup and Rugby World Cup is all very well, but how economically efficient is it for us to keep losing them again? Business needs certainty: just ask Michael Barnett or Frank O’Sullivan.

Here’s the answer. Stage a combined tournament in a trio of sports that makes us utterly unassailable. Each day for, oh, about a hundred days I reckon, you put on a match in three legs, with two teams of about two dozen players. First leg, you go out and buy a spec’ house somewhere in Auckland. You tart it up. Once that’s done, and you’ve had a quick lunch, you move on to the second leg. You take your world class yacht out on to the Hauraki Gulf and do your beating to windward and your keelhauling around the mark, and the puffing of your spinnaker, and your long luffing and whatever the hell else it is they do out there all afternoon. The important thing is, as ever, that you don’t break your stick and you get back over the line ahead of the other boat. With the remaining daylight hours, you get the spec house on the market and flick it off for a profit. By this stage, you’re ready to head to the Eden Park Coliseum for the third and final leg under lights. This will be a three hour game of rugby (with ad breaks) played according to whatever new rules are necessary to address whatever is presently wrong with the game everywhere else in the world.

You win a point for getting home first, another point for flicking your house for more than the other team and a third point for winning the footy game. Whoever has the most points after a hundred days is the world champion. As any fule kno, no-one in the world is better than “us” at any of these events. Put all three together and we will totally cream all comers.

As for the economic ramifications, well, all three sports are prized by that most desirable of all economic market segments: the High Net Worth Individual. They will come here for the duration of the tournament and they will spend like there’s no tomorrow, except of course there will be 100 of them.

And there’s more! After 100 days of the cocaine and hookers and high-rolling at Sky City, they’ll probably be feeling penitent. That will be the moment for the masterstroke: You introduce them to KiwiSaviour.

For your Friday enjoyment, here are two YouTube clips. The first one is a positive and empowering message made by an advertising agency as part of a viral campaign for a company in the beauty industry trying to stab all the other companies in the beauty industry in the back. It's crisp, slick and fascinating.

The second one is a spoof of it. It's hilarious and merciless. Make sure you watch the first one first, and that you watch this next one right to the end. It's worth it.

In other news, this is my new Motofone F3. With the batteries out. Can I get a "woooooo" over here?

I like to call it the Headless Chicken trick. The neato bit is that the display is made by E-Ink, the company that's developing e-paper technology for Philips. The bistable display (once it's in one state, it stays that way) is based on the same technology as e-paper, though it has a resolution of about 200. That's like an old-school digital watch screen, but bigger.

It only uses power when it's changing states (i.e. going from black to white), and even then, it's still a lot more energy efficient than normal LCD screens, because it doesn't actually emit light. Like paper, it relies on reflect light (though it has a tiny backlight, too.

It's the most bleeding-edge piece of technology I've ever owned, but it's the least sophisticated phone I've ever had, too. Its bleeding-edge display is functionally equal to ye digital watches of yesteryear (see photo). It displays a maximum of 12 characters at a time, can't distinguish between upper and lower case. It has no 3G, GPRS, camera, Bluetooth or IRDA, which makes sense, because it doesn't have the memory to store nor the means to display anything that it would receive.

The whole get-up is designed for poor people in developing countries - rural India in particular. Its interface (no words, just icons and voices) is made for illiterate people and its designed with price in mind. It cost me, brand new, $60. It speaks English, French and Swahili.

Usually, I'd feel dirty about talking up a cellphone so much, but in this case, the sheer brilliance of this phone is an indictment of whole damn cellphone industry.

I am no cellphone luddite. I have been using big fat PDA-phones with touchscreens and internet browsers for a few years, but I'm just taken aback at how practical, intuitive and beautiful such simplicity can be.

It's a phone. It calls people.

It's such an elegant design, it makes me want to weep. Of course, it's not for sale in the US or Canada, and I'm not sure about it's availablity anywhere else (you can get it on TradeMe, though). And for good reason. If the idea of $60 phones caught on, phone makers wouldn't last very long. The whole industry is advanced through making people take unbearably grainy photos in inappropriate situations, download annoying ringtones in ever more annoying quality, etc.. What on earth would they do if people just wanted a phone that, you know, made calls?

I'm in awe that the designers had the balls to buck a decade's worth of industry convention and go back to basics in such a spectacular way.

Excuse me. I have to go and touch my phone now.

The camera never lies. Google Street View has been catching people unawares, sunbathing, sidling out of nudie bars, loafing on the job. But the quiet toilers who seek no glory for their selfless efforts are coming into their own as the camera snaps away. Here are some shots that have taken Google Map readers by surprise this week.

Doug Heffernan has been up early every morning for the past six days laying on free electricity for vulnerable customers. It is not easy work. Here we see him in an awkward moment as his lavalava becomes entangled in the wires.

The art director who made London's Olympic logo cannot ride his bicycle to the agency these mornings with about being mobbed by adoring fans. "More, more!" they cry, he tells us, and his hearing must be equally as singular as his design talent, because to the untrained ear, it almost sounds like "moron".

From Monday to Thursday, the creative team for the Burger King account are edgy post-modern ironists. Come Fridays, though, no matter who's putting on lunch, they slip away for a consciousness-raising session with the Mt Roskill International Sisterhood of Women.

McDonalds, the quiet reformers in the world of nutrition, are seven and a half years into a top secret programme designed to drain 91% of the fat from their quarter pounders.

Despite a hectic schedule of G8 meetings and poisonings, Vladimir Putin takes ten minutes each day to seal up another missile silo. “All I saying: give peace chance”, he says. “Cold war: history. Dubyadubya2: very capable man.”





No matter how grim the news from the front, George W Bush continues to guide the war effort from the back.

This paragraph is a division to stop the rest of the images from running onto the front page of the site.


You can see the rest of the series over the break, and if LOLnats make no sense to you, you can follow the story here.

UPDATE

Requests are going here:

(Manatee's dark moment by kind suggestion of Chris Bell via Boing Boing.)

John Key

Hi God, please bless the school mums in their four-wheel drives and the ambitious dads on struggle street and the kids in McGehan Close and all the rest of South Auckland as well, and of course Bill English and the reporters who have been top value on this honeymoon, and not forgetting Graham Henry and the boys, and all the hard working Kiwis, and everyone in the world really, and of course Alan Greenspan, but not those losers in Labour. If you keep sticking it to them, you won't be getting any complaints from me.

Helen Clark

Dear God, are these numbers right?

Jeanette Fitzsimons and Russel Norman

Friends, we gather today in a spirit of harmony and mutual understanding, but with the lights dimmed, of course, to preserve energy. We draw on the positive spirit that all humanity innately possesses - even Trevor Mallard and Tony Ryall - in a non judgemental, non-confrontational way of course, and we express the hope that this house will channel that spirit in a way that might bring a more perfect understanding of the imperfect world in which we live. We also pray that John Key will give us a better deal than the one we got from this lot.

Philip Field

Jesus no, Jesus no, Jesus no. This can't be happening.

Gerry Brownlee

Can I have a shout out for my homey Buddah?

Bob Clarkson

Our father who art a good bloke. It's your round.

Peter Dunne

Bless me, and all the enlightened followers of the Jesus Loves a Pig Shooter party.

Ashraf Choudhary

Abstained.

Winston Peters

Bless Me.