Island Life by David Slack

I have been unable to sleep at night for fretting about the incarceration of Paris Hilton. How will she endure her 23 days of solitude? And how many thousands may suffer permanent hearing damage on June 5 as her cell door swings shut and a cheer goes up around the globe?

At a dinner in Miami a few weeks ago, starlets Hilary and Haylie Duff reportedly toasted Hilton's sentence. And a member of a rival celeb's camp in LA was heard to crow: "We're all hoping somebody knocks some sense into that bitch when she's there."

Violence. The universally acknowledged but imperfectly-policed dimension of prison life.

Even when you're not being pinned against a wall and tormented, it's no Hilton for a Hilton. Ask an LA criminal defense attorney:

Forty-five days in L.A. County Jail is really rough. That's an awful, hellish place. Conditions are miserable, people take showers under cold dripping water, the food is completely inedible.

Paris, the news reports tell us, has "already received death threats" and is taking self-defence classes. She's also buying books about Buddha, God, and anyone else who might do a better job for her than all the useless help she has on the payroll.

Not that she may need them. "Reports" report that she will be housed in a 'special needs unit' reserved for police officers, public officials, celebrities and 'other high-profile inmates' and she will have a panic device to holler for a prison guard in case she strikes trouble.

I don't wish any physical harm on her. I don't wish physical harm on anyone. But what makes her special? Doesn't every prisoner deserve to be protected from harm in prison?

If you have the capacity to read harrowing material, keep reading. Otherwise stop now. It comes from a Salon story about a Tennessee man who found himself banged up in one of America's toughest jails.

Interviewed at his home, decorated with bright Christmas knickknacks, Liberto chokes back sobs as he remembers the scene.
Two men stood by the cell door. They ordered Liberto to shut up or they would slit his throat. Pull your pants down, they said. One of the men pushed a spoon into Liberto's mouth. "They told me to suck on this spoon, lick it real good," he says, barely able to talk through his sobs. "They bent me over and rammed that spoon in my rectum so hard, ramming it and turning it and shoving it and they said, 'We're getting you ready.' And then they took their penises out and put them in my face and rubbed them on my mouth. I could feel one of them back there. They put a handkerchief or something in my mouth."
The guards announced it was time to lock down the pod again. As the men who had orally raped and sodomized him left his cell, Liberto says that a guard yelled at his assailants, "Did you show that white boy a good time?"

If the State sends someone to prison knowing they may be beaten or raped, and they fail to avert that harm from taking place, are they complicit in the harm? The sentence in court may read "Three years and six months imprisonment", but if the jailers cannot protect that prisoner, should the sentence not actually read "Three years, six months and an unspecified number of beatings, violations and general torment?"

Some of my fellow New Zealanders are feeding P to their pitbulls to make them more aggressive. This is thrilling news for armchair spectators of suburban mayhem, although I couldn't blame Damian for keeping his cat indoors until the matter is resolved.

But once more it turns out that there is nothing new under the sun. I turn to the Internet and discover that from 1942, Adolf Hitler received daily injections of methamphetamine from his personal physician, Dr Theodor Morell. Talk about putting out fire with gasoline.

In Hitler's Wehrmacht, methamphetamine tablets branded as Pervitin were liberally distributed to German fighting troops throughout the War. Amphetamines are "power drugs" that reduce fatigue, heighten aggression, and diminish human warmth and empathy.

Wherever you strike aberrant behaviour, the presence of drugs may well provide the explanation.

MDMA, most commonly known today by the street name ecstasy, is a semisynthetic entactogen of the phenethylamine family, whose primary effect is to induce a general sense of openness, empathy, energy, euphoria, and well-being. Tactile sensations are enhanced for some users, making physical contact with others more pleasurable.

Contrary to popular belief, MDMA does not necessarily produce aphrodisiac effects.

LSD is a whole other cauldron of airborne bats. The drug sometimes leads to disintegration or restructuring of the user's historical personality and creates a mental state that some users report allows them to have more choice regarding the nature of their own personality.

Tui, however, is a drug without consequence. Its only effect is to hook you up with hot chicks.

The most memorable birthday present I ever got was a heart attack, but outside of that my most vivid recollection is of the one I was given when I turned eight.

I can see the packaging, I can remember the weeks I spent hoping I would get it and I know it was made by Lincoln International, but for the life of me, I can’t tell you what it was called.

Those Lincoln people were huge. The TV ads made that clear. The only cool lunchbox to have was a Lincoln TuckerBox. It had a water bottle that clicked onto the handle. “Boy oh boy, a Lincoln toy” was the slogan. They were simple times, but we were happy.

On Friday, Mary-Margaret will turn eight. I am mostly an attentive father and I share many of the parenting tasks, but this will be yet one more year when the gift expectations will have been relayed to Karren, and acted upon by the more organised grownup in our household. I have been able to tell Mary-Margaret with absolute truth that I can’t tell her what she’ll be getting.

STAN
You guys, I'm getting that John Ellway football helmet for Christmas.
CARTMAN
How do you know?
STAN
'Cause I looked in my parents' closet last night.
CARTMAN
Yeah, well I sneaked around my mom's closet too and saw what I'm getting. The Ultravibe Pleasure 2000.
STAN
What's that?
CARTMAN
I don't know but it sounds pretty sweet.

My Lincoln toy was a kind of construction kit; a plastic version of the Meccano set. Some of the pieces survive to this day. I don’t know when I stopped playing with them, but they would have been stashed in a dusty box by the time I was lighting my first Pall Mall Menthol underneath the bridge down the road from school in North Street. Gran kept the dusty box of plastic pieces, though, and one day she gave them to Mary-Margaret, who takes great pleasure in knowing that they were once Dad’s.

My other strong memory of that year was a week staying with another family while the folks were away. I was unjustly accused by two of the kids and held to account that night by their father. While he solemnly intoned about the difference between right and wrong and telling a lie, the black and white TV on the other side of the room was playing the news. There were pictures of tanks rolling into Prague. I can truly say I was filled with indignation, but I would also have to say in truth that my solidarity with the Czech people would only come much later.

Mary-Margaret was full of questions about ANZAC day this year. We spent time talking about the horror and futility of the First World War. We told her about her granddad’s father and uncle and grandfather who all spent tormented months in trenches in Western Europe. We told her that only two of them came home, and that one of them was traumatised for the rest of his long life. She doesn’t watch the TV news as much as I did at her age, although her child’s bat antennae can pick up a news item about the smacking debate from four rooms away, and she will scamper to the source to hear more. All politics is indeed local. She has a strong sense of empathy and consideration for the people around her, and she’s a lovely kid. I hope she gets something really nice tomorrow.

Hey you, Public Address reader! Are you aged between twenty and forty? Do you have a student loan statement sitting inside an unopened envelope? Are you paying a crippling rent for your modest dwelling? Are you drinking all your coffee at Ponsonby cafes and sucking down eight dollar Heinekens at Viaduct bars? Are you wasting your meagre salary on YSL sunglasses and stereo equipment? And are you known to gripe about the impossibility of buying your own home? Boy, have you been taking a scolding in the Herald readers feedback pages for the last day or two.

The Property Investors Federation vice-president Andrew King had this to say on the front page about people who were making $70,000 and thought they couldn't afford a house.

It might not be the house that you want to live in long-term, but you could buy a $350,000 house in Te Atatu, Glenfield, Panmure or Pukekohe.
People should spend less money on coffee and brand new cars and overseas trips.
It's up to them to save more. This is a culture of 'I want it now, I want everything and I deserve it'.

That's what we call a gutsy opening bid, down here at the auction rooms.

What has followed in the online debate has been spirited, but largely, mercifully, free of invective. Mr King is enthusiastically endorsed by others sharing their own stories of frugality, adversity and patience blossoming into the reward of mortgage-free, not to mention gains-tax-free contentment.

In retort, dozens of readers itemise their income and demonstrate themselves to be spending precious little on anything but rent, groceries and child care.

So much anecdotal evidence, so little coffee. Someone is clearly drinking it. What to make of it all? I'd like to hear more stories and see some more numbers before I could be persuaded that the so-styled 'dream of home ownership' is vanishing for a growing number of young New Zealanders.

But I don't need to read any more to conclude that we have our investment priorities completely screwed up. Buying each others' houses has been a poor substitute for real economic enterprise.

But to whom should one turn if not one's real estate agent? Well, why not try Mr Rod Drury, or some of his smart mates doing exciting things in Silicon Welly? You could ask the clever people in the white coats, like say the A2 people, or Peter Gluckman. You might ask Craig Norgate about 21st century farming, that is to say: buying up the dairy farms of Latin America.

I personally favour the internet as a means of making a living, but I'm not blind to other possibilities.

One would be this: why don't we become Australia's farm?

This drought business is growing grim indeed. Here's a picture of me and Mary-Margaret at a friend's farm in New South Wales last week. As you can see, they're parched.

This is how you can skew things with anecdotal evidence. They live in a pocket of country in the Manning River valley, which is about three hours north of Sydney. Much of the country less than an hour's drive away from there is nothing like it. They're just lucky.

Oddly enough, there isn't a great deal of farming going on in the area. It was dairy farming country, but after Britain joined the common market, most of the small holdings with their few cans of cream gave it away. Our friends have been there for two decades now, living in the big European barn they built on their hundred acres. They've let ninety per cent of the land go back to bush. On the other ten acres, they fatten cattle. All around the area, city types have been drifting back to the country, not to become farmers, but to enjoy the life. It's a bit bohemian, a bit feral, but mostly authentic Australian bush.

They have a volunteer fire brigade at Killibach Creek and every Friday they have a couple of beers. Ian says, there's no-one there at one minute to five, and two minutes later, there are a couple of dozen of them. This summer just gone, they got pulled in to help fight a fire in the Taree state forest. Ian says when the smoke got so thick that the sun was just a pale disk in the sky, he got a bit of a jolt.

In Australia, the fires will keep coming, but the rain can stay away far longer than a farmer can cope.

Fully seventy per cent of all the water goes into agriculture.

John Howard is talking about turning off irrigation in Victoria next week in order to keep enough coming for the citizens who (mostly) don't drink it from a trough.

When you've got lemons, make lemonade. Hey mate! Over here! We've got enough water for our farms. How about this: we do all the farming for you and supply whatever you need. You can give up the farms, let them go back to bush, and solve the water problem.

We'll keep you in steaks and milk, and all we ask in return is that we ride the coat-tails of your astonishing resources boom. Money for everyone! Enough to put us all in flash houses.

When I was a pre-schooler, there was a monstrous power pylon about two paddocks away from our house. I see all the lamentation in the modern media about the harm those huge electric brutes can do to a body, and I can't help wondering if its effects didn't turn me away from the path of a good, honest, toiling son of the soil.

At seven, it was clear that I was hopelessly short-sighted.

By nine I was demonstrably too un-coordinated to be of any use in the seven-a-side footy team.

I was showing strong signs of a lefty political persuasion by the fourth form and at fifteen I was listening to progressive rock.

Loyal readers will be only too well aware of my various maladies up to and including a damaged heart muscle.

I could blame my genes, I could blame my parents, I could rail at the heavy overcoat of conformity in which a small town like Feilding tries to dress you.

I could, at a pinch, even blame myself.

But I'll blame the pylons.

They're imposing and eerie to an adult's eyes, but to a child's they're just impossibly vast and other-worldly.

In 1966 I liked my Thunderbirds and my Flintstones in black and white on the ghosting afternoon TV, but the cartoon character that really impressed me was Gigantor. It can't have been much of a show, because it never resurfaced with all the others when the boomers began indulging their taste for retro TV comfort food. But that Gigantor, he was something fierce; an enormous dumb robot who looked an awful lot like the pylon outside our house, and all the other pylons that strode across the landscape, south to Bunnythorpe and north to Kimbolton and over the hills and out of sight.

Erica Lloyd is a good friend of Public Address and an old documentary of hers is now available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube

She was fascinated by the power pylons as a kid. Her doco takes the camera out to Te Atatu and looks up at the pylons, through her own eyes as a child and also through the eyes of the guy who has one in his back yard - "It made the house affordable". He has just one lament: "We've had thirteen cats and they've all run away".

An architect describes the design sense of these wonderful artefacts of Art Deco style. A health campaigner campaigns. A young man climbs the tower.

It's a twelve minute delight, and you can see it in two parts here.

Seeing I'm at it, some other video treats as well. The Onion's splendid new video service has this on the dreadful cost of immigration:

Immigration: The Human Cost

And finally, I notice that on TorrentSpy.com there's a screener version of this coming Sunday's new episode of the Sopranos. That Tony - he's almost as cool and scary as Gigantor.